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| Come Down O Love Divine (Michael Bouman) HM 2018 |
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| Bible Grove (Michael Bouman) Stunning in a clump. |
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.
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:
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| Big Eyed Girl (Michael Bouman) |
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| Background Check (Michael Bouman) |
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| A Bicycle Built for Blues (Michael Bouman) |
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| A Man called Paladin (Michael Bouman) |
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| Herds of Black Pianos (Michael Bouman) |
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| Bible Grove (Michael Bouman) |
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| Keb's Favorite (Michael Bouman) |
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| Mom's Mirth (Michael Bouman) |
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| I Like You and I Love You (Michael Bouman) |
