I welcome you to my page concerning the cultivation and hybridization of day lilies or daylilies. I am embarking on this adventure in a modest way and on an experimental basis and I am making the results of my work and my experiences available to you. This page will be constantly evolving, as will my research, and I invite you to leave me your comments and suggestions.
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| H. 'Ghislaine Grenier Larose' |
At the start of my adolescence, my sister Ginette introduced me to the pleasure of growing houseplants. She gives me some cuttings and divisions that she had at home: African violets, a praying plant and a coleus. Not doing too badly, my mother, who bought books from Grolier, brought me a book on houseplants. This book broadened my horizons and my sister and I began buying and sharing houseplants of all kinds. But my favorites remain, and still are, African violets and marantas, the praying plants.
The time comes to leave for studies, Alma, I am a native of Dolbeau-Mistassini, and then Montreal. It must be said before continuing that I managed to pollinate a flower of my African violet which was white with blue petal edges. The seeds I sowed gave me white flowers and blue ones. But, at that time, the internet had not yet arrived, it was very difficult to find out about hybridization.
I continue my story. So, in Montreal, I met a cousin of my friend Renaude. Her name is Ginette, too, and she is a member of the Association of African Violet Lovers of Montreal. Isn't that wonderful? She explains to me how it works and invites me to one of their monthly meetings which take place at the botanical garden. I discover violets with yellow flowers, creeping violets, miniatures, with variegated foliage, etc. I became a member of the association, I bought a few plants and cuttings and I had fun growing them and making them flower.
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| H. 'middendorffii' |
During the summers, I returned home and got a student job as a laborer at the Dolbeau greenhouses. This company had 10 large greenhouses, half of which were for annual plants and the other half for hydroponic growing of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. In the same years, we received with the Simpson Sears catalog, a small catalog of outdoor plants: perennials, bulbous plants, shrubs, rose bushes, etc. So I started gardening outside the house and we brought in a few rose bushes, spring bulbs, shrubs and a few perennials including a set of 3 day lilies, one yellow, one orange and one of two colors more dark.
All this grows happily but life takes me elsewhere, I leave the family home and I no longer do gardening. Of all these plants, there remain only a few peonies and a day-old lily, the yellow one, which flowers in spring, at the end of May, beginning of June, and which gets the lawnmower run over it after each flowering, but which persists in growing from one year to the next, it has dog as one could say. Several years later, in 2017, I bought a house and slowly got back into gardening with the plants that were there. I then decide to go look for the daylily which still grows at my brother's house, he is the one who has the family house now, and I manage to collect a dozen very small fans which I plant, in three groups, in the flat -band at the front of the house. The following year, I only had one flower but the plant gained strength and it has been flowering well since then. After extensive research, it is H. 'middendorffii' and it will become the basis of my hybridization experiments.
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| H. 'Pierrette Pronovost Gagné' |
With the purchase of the house, I started to think about landscaping, there is only grass here, and I am drawing up some ideas. This year, the roof has been redone, so I can move on to the garden for years to come. While searching the net on this subject, I came across a daylily garden site, I don't remember which one, but it introduced me to the AAHQ site which introduced me to the Facebook page, the links to the AHS, and the gardens of AAHQ members, etc. So I send an email to show my interest in becoming a member and I am told that in my sector, I am in Chicoutimi, there are a few members who cultivate and hybridize daylilies, including Louise Niquet who is in the Dolbeau sector- Mistassini. On Louise's website, Jardin l'Hémérocalle, I see that it is possible to visit your garden and also that it is possible to buy hybrids that are not yet registered and have them registered. I make an appointment with her at the beginning of August 2021, she shows me around her garden while explaining to me how she goes about hybridizing, harvesting the seeds and sowing and everything else. I mentioned to her that I would like to register two hybrids in the name of two of my aunts who are close to me. While walking through her garden, she showed me two that were available and that I immediately liked. We take the tillers out of the garden, she shows me how to divide them, replant them and record them. These plants will become my first two recordings at the AHS, H. 'Pierrette Pronovost Gagné' and H. 'Ghislaine Grenier Larose' in 2021, creation by Louise Niquet.
All this gives me the bug, not the one against COVID, but the one to make a garden of hererocallis around the house for my landscaping. It also gives me the urge to do hybridization. But before getting there, I have to do my classes in order to cultivate them from seeds that I buy from friends who are members of the association, Louise obviously, Huguette, Josette and Ginette, have another. Currently, as of this writing, in January 2022, I have 295 little shoots growing in the basement. Some are more than two months old and more than 12" high. From these plants, I hope to have some great discoveries which will, with other plants that I have ordered for spring, be the basis of my experimental program. 'hybridization.
In finishing this little presentation of my journey in gardening and which will continue to progress, I invite you to read the following pages and I wish you good navigation.