I think I may have first met Michael Bouman some years ago at our mutual friend, Curt Hanson's Crintonic Gardens. We've gotten to know each other more on Facebook, sharing daylilies and having conversations about hybridizing and our favorite introductions. Michael is one of the nicest people I have gotten to know over these past 5 or 6 years and he has had a lot of experience with various hybridizers. So, I am happy to kick off the interview season with his story. Here is Michael's interview:
Intro
When I was a child in New Egypt, New Jersey, and later as a
teen in the suburbs of Trenton, my family’s life revolved around my mother’s
side of the family, my father having come east right out of college in
Minneapolis to make a career as an architect.
My grandfather in New Egypt developed a huge vegetable and fruit garden
behind his house during his retirement.
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| Michael, age 2, with his grandfather, Bill Feaster |
“Pop-pop” had a blueberry patch, a strawberry patch,
asparagus, a stand of sweet corn, loads of tomatoes, peas, and beans. Fresh produce from the garden was always a
feature of summer meals there. My Aunt
Millie, who lived with my grandparents until they died, grew row upon row of
Gladiolus and Dahlias. I don’t remember
seeing daylilies there, but they were part of the roadside scenery everywhere,
and when I was a teen, daylilies “called me” from an advertisement in the
Sunday New York Times.
The plants that called me were the common fulvous daylily,
and I did nothing about that call until I had a home in rural Vermont fifteen
years later. I moved hundreds of those
plants from an abandoned farm to my house and loved their presence around my
house.
How did you get interested in daylilies?
The mass planting of common daylilies was fine
for a few years. I had them
everywhere. But then one day I saw a pot
of HYPERION in bloom at a local nursery and I had to bring it home. A year later I decided to expand the colors
and styles of daylilies by getting a packet of assorted seeds from either Parks
or Burpee. I started them in potting
soil the depth of a baking sheet, grew the little starts under a weak plant
light, and sacrificed a few to our cat, who thought I was growing kitty
grass. When spring arrived, I moved them
to the north side of the house (for protection, I thought) and watched them languish
with no direct sun for a year or two.
Some astute deduction led me to transplant them to a sunny spot and they
took off! A year later I had a small
collection of blooming seedlings. Those
plants suited me through the eighties. I
got to know their differences as plants.
Some adapted well to a sandy hillside and did better than the common daylilies massed
there. One had such a shocking manure
brown color that I tossed it into the woods.
One was like a bigger and floppier HYPERION. One had upright foliage that seemed to say,
“Halleluia!”
Lewis Hill, the author of Daylilies: The Perfect
Perennial owned a daylily plantation about an hour’s drive away. His advertisement beckoned from the back
pages of the local weekly. Finally, I
went there one July day and came home with a carload of hybrids in small
pots. Thus, my collecting began about
thirty years ago. I bought Hill’s book a
year later, joined the AHS, and started ordering catalogs.
Which Hybridizer Introduced You to Daylily Hybridizing?
I didn’t have a mentor at first, though I knew about seeds
and raising seedlings. Among the first
catalogs I read, the ones written by Darrel Apps moved me the most. I admired his prose style and the brainpower
behind the writing. Because of that, his
were my first mail-order daylilies. When
I opened my first box of plants from him a new world opened for me.
First goals
I started hybridizing to see if I could create plants worthy
of space in my garden. My first
collection of several dozen cultivars gave me a lot of decent plants to observe
and evaluate. One that made the best
impression close up or from a distance was Wild’s SLEIGH RIDE. In northern Vermont its color was a vivid
coral red. It made a clump with what
seemed perfect proportions; just an ideal daylily, except for the early dying
off of the foliage. My first goal was to
cross SLEIGH RIDE with reds that looked alive longer. I wasn’t thinking fully about the total
plant, so my crosses were of the dummy variety and I didn’t hit my goal before
losing interest in it. I took a job in St. Louis before my first crop bloomed.
When I moved to St. Louis in 1995 and met Oscie Whatley, my
program got a fresh start. Oscie gave me
several of his plants to get me going, and I resolved to use his plants as a
foundation for a big part of my hybridizing.
I would work with mates he wasn’t using and find my own way. I am still working with that approach, though
I have always had several other interests.
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| Oscie Whatley |
Challenges
Hybridizing for me has been a journey of exploration and
discovery. I wanted to find out what
might come of crossing X with Y. If X or
Y were excellent plants, all the better.
That is the opposite of “focus,” I suppose. I wanted the seedlings to teach me and maybe
suggest other things to try. The
challenge there is the high number of possible things to try. There’s a tricky balance between trying new
ideas and giving attention to developing things I’ve already registered.
Every winter I make a list of “projects” I want to give
attention in the coming bloom season.
“Take the tender blue eyes to BRIDGETON FINESSE” is one such
project. “Put the best oranges on MAPLE
HUES” is another. “Cross my lavenders
with dormant mates” is a third. “Cross the sibs and half-sibs of the children
of BIG EYED GIRL (2021) all over the place.
See if VISION SEEKER will “pass through” my big blue eyes. The challenge of that focus-free approach is
to avoid crossing things just because they are there or just because they will
give me insurance against a poor seed harvest.
Breeding fine reds is a challenge because there are
already a gazillion fine ones. I’m
currently trying to increase the size of my reds and am selecting for size and
form in seedlings that open well and have great color. Color is a problem in reds. I’ve discarded so many of the whoppers I
bought to try out because the color wasn’t as good as the size or the
form. I think Whatley’s MOHICAN CHIEF
transmits very strong, sun-resistant red color, and so does Kirchhoff’s BETTY
FORD. My intro BILLIE J. is out of those
two parents and it is proving to be a good parent as well.
Naturally, the color blue is a challenge. I don’t mind that challenge because there are
so many paths to explore and so much beauty even in the failures. I like to use Santa Lucia’s CITY CENTER and
Sellers’s CLAUDINE’S CHARM for clear colors in blue-eyed purples. Evick’s STONE PALACE MAGIC carries on the
clarity of CLAUDINE’S CHARM and makes for magical kids. I’ve made several good keepers out of Tet.
CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION by crossing to Mike Derrow’s THE TRIBBLE WITH BLUE and
Richard Norris’s CLARITY OF VISION, but they don’t have the light blue eye that
I often see in Bill Waldrop’s CARIBBEAN BLUE.
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| Creating new seedling beds in Spring 2011 |
How many seedlings do you grow every year?
When I moved to my current location in 2010 I designed “beauty
beds” for the back yard, seedling strips for the right slope, and a breeder
collection on the flat ground in the front.
I planned on 2,000 seedlings each year.
I
generally have 200 selections to winnow down at the end of every summer,
because the space available in my “keeper bed” is finite, so if I plan to save
100 new ones, I have to prioritize as well as get rid
of 100 old ones. I prioritize with
PowerPoint because I take a lot of pictures.
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| Peak bloom recently |
I can group selections by “program” and arrange the most interesting eye
patterns together. I make notes during
the season about dormancy, vigor, branching, opening, and pod fertility, and
those notes go into the PowerPoint slides.
I may number a lot of reds, but I want to save only the most promising;
it goes like that in all categories.
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| Hyperion anchors the front walkway |
The greatest pleasure of the bloom season is the morning
garden walk with Karen. I knew Karen
from our daylily club when Kathy Bouman died in 2014, and we started to keep
company that fall. We married in 2015. Karen is what I call a “total
plantsperson.” She loves every sort of
ornamental plant and shrub, every bird, every butterfly, the ducks and geese on
the lake, the toad in the compost pile.
We deadhead the “beauty beds” in the back yard on our way to
the tomatoes and cucumbers and seedling beds.
Karen has an extremely astute eye for detail. I trust her first impressions, so if she
says, that one must have a number,” it gets a number, and then we’ll see
how it competes when push comes to shove.
My most exciting seedlings in this year’s harvest were in my
“blues workshop” category. I can’t say I
have anything game-changing in the quest for blue, but the joy of the pursuit
is such that I prioritize the blues and blueberry colors. Here are a few that I moved to the keeper bed
in late August.
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19-77 (Instant Celebration(Korth) X Tet. Crystal Blue Persuasion) X
Venetian Pools (Pierce) |
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19-64 (Eyes of the Beloved (Ansari) X Unknown) X
Venetian Pools (Pierce) |
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| 19-141 Venetian Pools (Pierce) X Say Can You See (Pierce) |
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| 20-130 Virginia City(Bouman) X Yoga Man (Hansen) |
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| 19-116 Yoga Man (Hansen) X 17-46 (Whale Tails (Hansen) X Waves of Joy (Trimmer) |
What are some of your favorite introductions from other
hybridizers?
Whatley’s BUTTER CREAM was and is an amazing cultivar and an
amazing parent. So is his DELIBERATE
PACE. The Korths’ ANCIENT OF DAYS is my
favorite black purple. Stacy Swain’s
AVON SUNRISE is a superb orange, just a great overall plant. Karol Emmerich’s output is consistently
wonderful, and my current favorite is BROKEN CHAINS. Jamie Gossard is well-represented here, and
how would anyone pick a “best” from so many winners? We love his BIG BIRDS FRIEND, WHERE EAGLES
SOAR, YELLOW TITAN, NEON FLAMINGO, BLACK PANTHER, and so many others. I have a lot of favorites from Curt Hanson,
too. PEOPLES PLEASURE PARK is a go-to
red for scape, height, and plant habit.
NELSON MANDELA and ELIZABETH PEACOCK are my favorite dark purples with
eyes. CRYSTAL CASTLES is but one of many
outstanding lavenders. Of Nan
Ripley’s wonderful plants, I love the kids I’ve saved from I CAN ONLY
IMAGINE. My two favorite pinks are Dan
Trimmer’s MEMPHIS and Paul Lewis’s LINDA ZAK, which seems worlds apart from
most other full-formed pinks. Mort
Morss’s RIPPLES AND REFLECTIONS and KYLE BILLADEAU are my current favorites of
his, and in my ever-revolving collection of David Kirchhoff’s amazing reds, I’m
loving the overall plant and scape of his MISTER HAROLD and the color of his
CARDINAL KISSES. I grow a lot of
Moldovan intros and especially love UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, THIEVING MAGPIE,
and TAE KWON DO. I always want to
explore the new things from Guy Pierce, even though I know a percentage won’t
like my garden. VENETIAN POOLS turned my
pattern program into something promising.
I’m still learning to like the big triangular eyes of the Tet. ROSE F.
KENNEDY kids, but I grow several of them just to see if they will thrive here. Mike Derrow’s intros have been in my garden
for twenty years. Current favorite is VISION
SEEKER. I’ve grown a lot of Richard
Norris plants over the years. SUBSTANTIAL REWARD and ASHWOOD’S MAGIC CRYSTAL
are favorites at present. Paul Aucoin’s LONGSHOT has permanent residency
here. Every time I look down on a clump
in my back yard I see perfection. His JANIE’S RED DAZZLER appears to be a
wonderful parent of reds in my program. I
grow several big red ones from my friend, Bobbie Brooks in Gloucester,
Mass. I’m trying to port the big green
throat of her I KNOW to my red seedlings.
I don’t grow many diploids, but my favorites are from Patti Waterman,
Kathy Krattli, and Carol “Seajay” Mock. I grow a nice collection of Sandy Holmes UF's, my two favorites being, I Lava You, and Lemon Strawberry Twist.
Some of my favorite daylily introductions
I had a plant of Oscie’s ROSE IMPACT before he registered
it. I was in love with it! I considered it a prime asset in my
collection, so I tried it with all sorts of mates. I crossed it with Munson’s COLLECTOR’S CHOICE
and got a knockout deep raspberry pink self that was bigger and brighter than
either parent, a rock-hardy evergreen that survived a December transplant. Ten years ago I named it MOM’S MIRTH. My mother enjoyed a good joke, you see.
COME DOWN O LOVE DIVINE has done well all over the country,
including Fargo, North Dakota. It is
from crossing Whatley’s BUTTER CREAM with another treasure of that era,
Stamile’s VICTORIAN LACE.
DIVINE BALLERINA is possibly a better overall yellow daylily. I love the color and form. It’s out of COME DOWN O LOVE DIVINE X BALLERINA
ON ICE. I’m also very fond of PUPPUCCINO
MORNING, from COME DOWN O LOVE DIVINE X FIRST KNIGHT.
Two of my favorites were selected from seeds my friend Paul
Aucoin sent me years ago. PAUL’S
BLESSING is a breathtaking polychrome of cream, pink, and melon tones. BLUES IN THE NEWS is a sort of “bruin” pink
with a lavender eye on a beefy plant.
It’s the sort of plant that can make you love a brown-tinged pink, ya
better believe it!
AN OLD FASHIONED WALTZ is a “champagne melon” beauty that
arose from an attempt to correct an opening problem in Phil Reilly’s ENCHANTED
FOREST. Intuition told me the
“discipline” in Whatley’s VOLVER would be just what the doctor ordered, and I
got lucky.
BIBLE GROVE turned out to be a fine addition to the black
daylily class. I had a guest seedling
from Roger Mercer that I combined with a dark, white-edged seedling of my own
creation and got a healthy, vigorous plant that literally produces a “grove” of
bible-black flowers. It’s named for a
town in northern Missouri.
There’s also a “herd effect” in my black HERDS OF BLACK
PIANOS. Both of these are evergreens, so
I’m trying to move their merits into dormant land.
DAD’S DRESS WHITES is a more recent favorite. It is vigorous, well-behaved, and it makes a
picture-perfect clump. It’s a great parent,
too!
COURT AND SPARK is a reblooming red orange that just gave us
its last flower on October 12. I made
the cross over twenty years ago, from Sarah Sikes’ SOUND AND FURY and Ed
Brown’s COLLIER. The seeds were among
several hundred that my friend, Bob Benbow raised as a favor to me, space being
very scarce. He raved about it for years
and I grew it here several times but never let it form a clump, so nothing
happened. Finally I tried it again, and
finally I saw what Bob had seen years earlier.
It makes a great garden specimen as a clump. It might well have been my first registration
back in 2005, but I didn’t name it until 2017, all things considered, and I’m
proud of it.
I’m finally ready to release BIG EYED GIRL, a fluke from
crossing ARNOLD’S DAUGHTER with
BRIDGETON FINESSE. It’s a seven-inch
gray lavender flower with a four-inch violet eye. “Oversize” eyes are considered treasure here,
so I’ve made lots of kids with BIG EYED GIRL, many of them with a lot more blue
color in the eye and many of them with somewhat larger eyes.
I haven’t done much with diploids, but by favorite is
PEPPERMINT WIND, a result of crossing two outstanding oldies in my collection
twenty years ago. GOODNIGHT KISSES is
also quite a good color accent in bright cherry red with a white edge. The name is a joke; I wanted to hear the
ladies say, “Oh, Michael, I’ve just got to have your GOODNIGHT KISSES!”
There are a lot more on my list of favorites, but I will
leave the list as it is.
Favorite Gardens to Visit
Kathy Krattli’s garden in nearby O’Fallon, Missouri is
“small” by most standards, but within the space available an exemplary
plantswoman’s touch is evident everywhere you look. Karen and I see her several times a year, as
much for the pleasure of her commentary as the perfect grooming of her garden.
Laura and Tom Hood’s lakeside garden, Nature’s Melody
Nursery in Warrenton, Missouri, is loaded with sun and shade plants, fabulous
garden art, landscaping features, and joy.
Their property is beautiful year-round.
Tom’s a guitar collector, as I am, and we get together once in a while
to play whatever we’ve been working on.
Here’s a picture of us in my living room a couple of years ago. I’m on the left with my Gibson J-200 120th
Anniversary Model, and Tom’s playing my “Elvis Pressley guitar,” a blonde
Gibson J-200.
I
love our Region 11 summer meetings for the opportunities to see how people
organize their gardens. There are so
many wonderful memories from trips to Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansa City,
Columbia, Topeka, and Manhattan, Kansas.
The late Julia Semon’s garden in Columbia was one of my favorites. I haven’t been to regional garden tours for one reason or
another in three years and hope 2021 will bring a turnaround.
Favorite Memories
My favorite memories involve the annual preparations and
plant sale of my club, the Greater St. Louis Daylily Society. The Friday afternoon gathering to “bag and
tag” the donated plants is a time of easygoing conversation among several dozen
friends. Then the Saturday and Sunday interaction
with all the shoppers is a real high! I
have more than twenty years of these fond memories, so this year’s pandemic
hiatus was a reminder of what we’ve lost.
No club meetings either, though we will try to have a zoom meeting this
month.
I remember sitting with Oscie Whatley on his patio one warm
March afternoon before he was to undergo surgery for Pancreatic Cancer in 2003. He asked me to fetch a shovel and dig up
seedling 6421 and take a fan home for myself.
I had only seen a picture of it at that point, and he knew I loved the
picture. The following year he named it
SASSY SALLY and I put it on the front cover of the 2004 AHS National Convention
booklet. The following summer he was
gone. I had enjoyed the pleasures of his
friendship for ten years. I can’t begin
to sum up the effects of his generous personality on me and anyone else who
knew him, even briefly.
I remember sitting with Mary Baker in a tour garden in 2000
and joking with her about an effect we called “Photoshop Blue.” I remember those jokes about blue when I
claim to have a daylily “blues workshop” where I produce seedlings with what I
think have something like sky blue eyes.
Here are three with blue that have made me take the pollen everywhere it
makes sense.
14-35
is usually this color. It’s from seeds
my friend, Dan Robarts, sent me in 2012.
(Jitterbug Blues x Piece of Sky) X (Arnold’s Daughter x Blue
Desire). I lined it out for possible
release, as it is quite hardy, easily pod fertile, reblooms, and often passes
good eye color on. I’ve had a chance to
grow Dan’s seeds every year since then along with several dozen from my friend,
Paul Aucoin.
17-237 might have a bluer eye than 14-35. It’s from 14-21 (from Dan’s seeds) ((Reach
for the Sky x Nick of Time) x (Arnold’s Daughter x Blue Desire)) X 14-73 (from
Paul’s seeds) (Mildred Mitchell X Bluegrass Music).
17-199 is nicknamed “Powder Blue Eye.” It’s from two of my seedlings: (Eyes of the
Beloved x Sweet Dobro Tune) X (Marilyn Morss Johnson x Jitterbug Blues). I suspect the smoothness of the color is
coming from Texas Blue Eyes by way of Sweet Dobro Tune.
It was a joy to get to know Gisela Meckstroth in
2012 when I volunteered to edit the AHS Regional Officers Handbook and put in
hyperlinks to make navigation easy.
Julie Covington was AHS President then, and she put me in touch with
Gisela, and we found ourselves on a “journey” somewhat like fixing up an old
jalopy. Gisela seemed like a sailboat
just catching the wind. When we got into
a thicket of confusion about postal regulations, she seemed almost
gleeful to slash and burn paragraphs that made no sense anymore.
I always looked forward to teaching Garden Judging workshops
from 2004 to 2019. I served as the
“Expediter” early in that period and welcomed the opportunity to tweak the
curriculum by adding historical context on the hybrid daylily. The only reason I retired from that work was
the decline in collecting that seemed to be going on. I was seeing fewer eligible daylilies,
including in my own collection, so it seemed right to step away. The joy of that work was not really the
awards system, per se, but the way the class helped people develop their powers
of observation.
I loved being our club’s Vice President and our Regional
President because of the opportunity to put programs together. Our region 11 Winter Gathering was begun
about twelve years ago by the late, great Bob Tankesley-Clarke. When I served for four years from 2014 to
2018 I had a ball finding speakers. The
most entertaining was Dick Peck, who I met through his wife, Donna, a wonderful
daylily person in Albuquerque. Dick is a
playwright and author and a natural storyteller, and I can’t say I’ve ever heard
him tell any story that wasn’t funny. He
had us all in stitches!
Currently, I can’t imagine more enjoyment than I’m having
with a team of super “image detectives” who are finding pictures to add to the
AHS database. Wow, the things we are
uncovering! Tim Fehr, Linda Sue Barnes,
Bobbie Brooks, Maureen Strong, Debbie Monbeck, Janice Wood, Joan Zetel, Janice
Kennedy, and of course our tireless Registrar, Elizabeth Trotter, and our
Archivist, Ken Cobb. We are working on
research that simply wouldn’t have been possible before the Journal Archives
were placed online in 2014. With the
archives at our fingertips we can resolve questions about puzzling details in
the online database.
Given your advanced age, have you considered bowing out
of hybridizing?
Anyone who has raised seedling crops and increased their
stock to a point of having enough to sell can do the math. Make seed this year, plant next year, see
first bloom the year after that, make final selection the year after that,
watch in the keeper bed for three more seasons, line out and watch again for
one more season. It’s a seven-year cycle
unless you want to cut corners and take a few risks.
If you’re concerned about the march of time, you count years
and think, “I might not have the energy to tend these plants seven years from
now, assuming I’m still alive. I’ll call
it a day.” I have certainly thought that
way. My current “hero,“ Dave Niswonger,
who is somewhat disabled but who still hybridizes beyond age 90 appears to have
a different answer to the math. What I
love about hybridizing is the coming in of new ideas as I work with the flowers
from day to day. I feel like a painter
to goes into his studio and thinks, “what shall I make of this today.” I am not living in the future, but the now,
and as long as it’s possible to enjoy the now, I will be in the garden, or in
my reading chair with one of our poodles as a lap warmer.
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| Michael Bouman and Max |
Now here are some of Michael Bouman's introductions:
What a lovely collection of daylilies Michael. Your property looks incredible. All the above photographs are the property of Michael Bouman and use without prior consent is prohibited. Thank you Michael for taking the time to do this interview and sharing your program with us. If you would like to see more of Michael Bouman's introductions, you can view them at http://www.daylilylay.com/ Not sure what will be our next segment, but I'm leaning towards patterns. Stay tuned.
