Last year around this time I was at John and Faye Shooter's Marietta Gardens when I discovered this wonderful blue eyed daylily called Mitchell Hagler that was hybridized by Cindy Dye. I logged onto their website and the first daylily I saw was Megabite....WOW! What a cool toothy daylily. Unfortunately Megabite is currently sold out. You can see some cool pics of Megabite at the top of the page. I wanted to learn more about Homeplace Gardens so I decided to ask Cindy to describe her path to daylily hybridizing in her own words. Here is what she wrote:
When my husband (Ken) and I moved to the Homeplace Gardens property 30 years ago, I was a young mother with a new home and 10 acres of blank space. Having grown up in a gardening family, I was eager to get dirty. Funds were short so I asked everyone I knew for cuttings, etc. A friend gave me a car load of hybrid daylilies without names and a garden was born. I often propagated my own plants and grew many things from seed. I saw a notice about a daylily show in town and thought it would be a good place to look for other hybrids. The rest is every daylily addict's history! I began hybridizing in the late 80's and registered my first introduction in 1994. Daylilies gradually took over our 1/2 acre vegetable garden. My husband started making his own crosses about 10 years later. We won back to back hybridizer's awards from Region 15.
We were active in our club, held offices, hosted an AHS National tour, started a new club winning our Region's Service Award in 2009, but always knew our first desire was to create plants that people would cherish in their gardens for years. Our gardening motto is "In passionate pursuit of the best". We travel to regional and national meetings and do some limited speaking engagements. Van Sellers lives within 30 minutes from us and taught us so much. He was brutally honest ( in a southern genteel way ) when viewing my seedlings in the early years. Our breeding focus has shifted with the trends as needed but we still breed for great performing garden plants. Ken's budbuilding dormants have found a niche in the northern gardening market and my love of color in the garden keeps me looking for that fancy faced garden performer. We make a great team and are each other's worst critic and greatest fan. This year we planted a few thousand seeds using MEGA BITE, TO DYE FOR, TETRA LINDA GLUCK, and CAROLINES FASHION (unregistered). We are excited to see bigger blooms, longer teeth, triple edges, adding patterns along the way. It is a wonderful time to be a hybridizer. Each year brings fantastic surprises in the garden. We are less than 2 hours from the 2014 AHS National Meeting site so come see what's new.
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The picture above is another future Dye introduction. The photo at the very bottom of the page is another of their new introductions called Beautiful Madness. Thanks to Ken and Cindy Dye for letting me share some photos of their wonderful daylilies! You can contact them at hpgardens@aol.com. Their website address is http://daylily.net/gardens/homeplace/index.htm
I hope you enjoyed this weeks installment and happy gardening!
