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| Red Morning (Bryan Culver 2022) (Seedling 1513A) |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 1919A. WOW! |
During the fall and winter seasons I like to go on Charlotte's Daylily Diary and click on the Hybridizer's Corner to see all the new daylily introductions on various hybridizer's websites. I've found myself drawn in to Bryan Culver's website over and over in previous years. So many lovely introductions and seedlings. A couple years ago Bryan Culver, Dave Mussar and Mike Georges came to visit my garden while they were in town to see Curt Hanson's daylilies. I've always wanted to learn more about Bryan's program so without anything further here is what Bryan wrote in response to a series of my questions about his program:
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| Bryan Culver hybridizing in his garden. Photo by Nick White. |
WRITTEN BY BRYAN CULVER:
I am the 7th generation Culver who has owned our 100 acre farm. The original Culver who settled here had around 3,000 acres and over the years with the various generations that has been divided up and sold off to the point I own the last bit of it. (Bryan Culver's farm is currently 135 acres located near Waterford, Ontario, Canada) Our farm is an original land grant from the Canadian Government. The farm is located about 2.5 miles from the small town of Waterford in the Province of Ontario. It is about 9 miles north of Lake Erie.
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| Culver Farm |
The last generations were dairy farmers as was myself until my mid thirties when I decided to not do it and I moved to Toronto and worked as an Operations Manager for the Kidney Foundation of Canada for 30 years until my retirement in December of 2012. My partner and I during that time lived in Oakville, Ontario which was a half hour from downtown Toronto. We used rapid transit to get to work.
After retirement we decided to sell our house in the city and move back to the farm which we still owned having rented it out for some years. How I got interested in daylilies was my mother was an avid gardener and had vegetable patches and many flower beds all around one of the two houses at the farm. As she aged it became hard for her to manage it all so we hired a gardener to come in a bit to help as did myself. Because she was brought up during difficult times, my parents even though they had a bit of money really hated to part with it. Now I am different and like to spend money. I read all kinds of books on gardening to put it to use in our home in Oakville and with that decided to buy a bunch of flower bed type of flowers for my mother. After trying many different types of perennial plants, I became discouraged about many of them because they either did not bloom very long or fell down. I heard about daylilies and how easy they were to grow and the length of time they would flower. I started buying for myself and my mother and that is how it all started.
My background in my earlier years was breeding Holstein dairy cattle and showing rabbits, pigeons, various kinds of chickens as well as being on the Board of Directors of Canada's largest bull stud pedigrees and genetics. Pedigrees and genetics were something I was really into. So, in the beginning of purchasing daylilies I brought in newly introduced daylilies from the United States. The genetics tempted my interest to try and hybridize them. After one try with around 200 seedlings I was hooked and thought this is not so hard and I have been doing it now for over 30 years. When we lived in the city I had the breeding plants there and grew the seedlings at the farm. Our farm has wonderful sandy loam soil plus we have lots of water because there are springs all over parts of the farm. We do not suffer if it is dry but do when it is too wet. We currently have around 2 acres devoted to daylilies and grow around 2,000 to 3,000 seedlings each year.
I had bought a number of Bill Munson, Steve Moldovan, Pat Stamile, and Jeff Salter intros in those early years and one thing which I noticed a lot during that time was most daylilies did not open well early in the day. Since I was working and did not get home from work until later, it was hard to judge how good the flower color was. Another bad attribute in those early times was if a daylily bloomed a lot or you put even a small amount of pods on the daylily, the next year it probably would not perform very well because of the stress of the pods and heavy blooming. Pod fertility was terrible on many daylilies, especially on yellow colored daylilies.
Pat Stamile from what I can remember was the first hybridizer to start the early morning opening designation on his intros plus stressing better pod fertility. Thankfully most of the intros I purchased were from Pat and had that added value. I think when I first found out about the Stamiles, they were still in New York state, but shortly afterwards they moved to Florida. Therefore a lot of his genetics had a lot of dormant genes in their introductions.
With what I had found out about daylilies in general and other perennials, I decided I wanted to try my hand at hybridizing and see if I could produce anything that was better than what was on the market back in the 1980's. My first goals were to produce a daylily that opened well early in the morning and had good clear color with decent bud count and branching. Those branches would be well spaced so the flowers would display well on the plant. Also a daylily that bloom over at least a month or better and not bloom out in a short period of time and the blooms wouldn't be all crowded on the scape.
Some of those earlier intros which I thought a lot about were Pat Stamile's ELEGANT CANDY. I wanted to breed pinks because it was my mother's favorite color plus I wanted to name one after her. To be honest there were no good colored pinks in those days, however ELEGANT CANDY was a true pink with an eye and there was only one generation of eyes in the cross to make it, therefore it should be easier to produce a solid pink using it with other lines of so called pinks. Oscie Whatley had the best pinks out there and I crossed those genes plus the early intros out of Tet. BARBARA MITCHELL and that is what started my first lines. The really great thing that ELEGANT CANDY put in my lines was it could take stress and then perform the next year just like the previous one. It was extremely pod fertile and transferred that into it's offspring for the most part. I have introduced a lot of pink ones over the years and those for the most part had those genes in them.
Another daylily I used was FOOLED ME, introduced by Phil Reilly, but that was 100% Don Steven's genetics and I was the first here in Canada to purchase it way back when it first came out. It is in all my red eyed intros along with GILLIAN (Trimmer). I have bred red eyes for many years.
My early purchases of daylilies were from hybridizers like Pat Stamile, Phil Reilly, Dan Trimmer, Steve Moldovan, Bill Munson and more recently Curt Hanson. Even more recent have been John Rice, Richard Norris, Karol Emmerich and Phil Korth. Those great hybridizers genetics have been added to my own lines and to give me what I introduce and breed with today. Not in the early years but a bit back, I used to think that John Rice was the finest hybridizer there was because when I there every year, not only did I see wonderful clear colored flowers with great branching and bud count, they were great plants as well. I took John's daylilies back to Waterford and they grew and bred well. Too bad John and his wife, Annette have had health problems, so they have had to reduce their hybridizing and now only do diploid hybridizing. I have always bred tetraploids.
My favorite daylily gardens over the years have been John and Annette Rice, Curt Hanson's Crintonic Gardens, Richard Norris's Ashwood Gardens and Daylily World (David Kirchhoff and Mort Morss who always give me a hoot.) Sandy and Mike Holmes always had something interesting to see plus a great hybridizing program. Today Curt Hanson's Crintonic Gardens (which is not that far away from us) always intrigues me because I always see something I like when I go there. He has a wonderful hybridizing program and I like what he does. For the most part well branched and budded plants with good height and clear colored flowers. By the way I do not like to buy short flowers. I like them to be a minimum of 32 inches in height. I am old and it is too hard to bend over to hybridize short flowers. Most all of my intros are 32-35 inches in height which is where I like them and Curt Hanson has a lot of those.
My favorite memories are meeting these hybridizers and seeing their hybridizing programs. I enjoy talking with each and every one of them. -- Bryan Culver
NOW SOME OF BRYAN CULVER'S MOST RECENT SEEDLINGS:
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2008D |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 1917A |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2002A |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2005A |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2114A |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2100A |
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| Bryan Culver seedling 2106B |
AND NOW SOME OF BRYAN CULVER'S INTRODUCTIONS:
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| Spirit Zone (Bryan Culver) HM 2010 |
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| Sun Panda (Bryan Culver) HM 2013, Don C. Stevens Award 2015 |
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| Sylvia Buchwald (Bryan Culver) |
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| Red Festival (Bryan Culver) |
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| Phyllis Mitchell (Bryan Culver) |
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| Norma Maureen (Bryan Culver) |
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| Lyla Willatt (Bryan Culver) |
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| Kelly Lee (Bryan Culver) |
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| Rose Electra (Bryan Culver) |
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| David Mussar (Bryan Culver) |
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| Dave Mussar and Bryan Culver |
Every time I do an interview, I learn so much more about that hybridizer and get a real insight into what is behind their hybridizing approach. Thank you so much Bryan for taking the time to share your experiences. You can see Bryan Culver's website at www.culverfarmdaylilies.com. Bryan's 2022 introductions should be up in a couple weeks, so check back then to see his updated site. All the above pictures are the property of Bryan Culver and use without prior consent is prohibited. Special thanks has to go to Dave Mussar who helped with photographs and information. Not sure what I have in store next but I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Thanks for stopping in.
