America Discovers Columbus

About Bob Faulkner there is much to say, and I will make a beginning with this post.  This is one of Bob's daylily seedlings.  There will be a lot more of these seedling pictures as I get into my story.

The national daylily convention took place in Columbus, Ohio last week.  What better theme for the big event than "Discovering Columbus?"  Actually, it's more a title than a theme, as the key experience of a daylily convention is discovering people you may have known only through email or not at all.  There is plenty of opportunity for that, as conventions are built around two days of bus tours of mostly household gardens.

The owners of these gardens have spent many years working on their landscaping and garden designs to promote the utmost enjoyment and interest for the visitors, not to mention themselves!

There are so many outstanding daylily breeders in Ohio that an extra day of touring was added for anyone who wanted to arrive a day early.  Kathy and I jumped on that opportunity.  We drove to Columbus last Wednesday with our good friend, Seajay Mock, and arrived around four in the afternoon.  A little later we took our GPS and found our way to the "German Village" area of Columbus and to Schmidt's Sausage Haus and Restaurant.  The evening was gentle when we got there, the wait for a table wasn't too bad, and the Haus was bustling with munching and gulping and dessert oggling.

The point of this post is Bob Faulkner, so I will dispense with a description of the mile-high plates of food I saw leaving the buffet line.  In a sausage haus, how can you avoid sampling them all?

Thursday morning, heavy-laden, we boarded the bus for a long drive to the Dayton area.  Bob's place is on a narrow and shady country road.  A person driving that road for the first time would probably not miss Bob's property because there is a sudden and dramatic change in the view as you come upon a lush roadside garden backed by a fancy black iron fence.  A stranger to this scene might imagine some kind of artist lives here, and the bold would stop to inquire.

There's what you see from the road.  The garden does not shout "daylilies!"  It says in all simplicy, "I do it my way."  In gold lettering within the big iron circle, you can read, if you stop, "Little York Farm, Est. 1834."  To the right side of this view is another iron gate and probably the best deer fence you've ever seen.

The lettering over this gate says "Time began in a garden."  The strange thing to the left of the gate is a metal sculpture of a daylily.  Several of these were convention raffle prizes.

You can't see the daylily breeding area from here.  Daylily breeding is not a pretty sight.  The rows of black plastic weed fabric are lined with unique plants fighting for their short-term life in a nail-biting draught, hoping Bob will favor them with several years of "further evaluation" and possible registration and sale down the line.  What you see as you enter the zone of Bob's life is a beautifully designed tranquility garden featuring a collection of distinctive rocks with companion plants.

Then you walk back into Bob's breeding zone.  The crazy weather this year brought on a bloom season two or three weeks earlier than average.  Bob's daylilies were well past their peak bloom, and yet I saw scores of seedlings testifying to Bob's interest in patterns on the floral face.  I was especially drawn to this one for the huge lavender eye on a clean cream face that curves down and out again as if dancing the Limbo.

This, too, drew my complete attention. The petals curve inward in a suggestion of modesty and shyness, but the complex pattern within suggests that the modesty is concealing a spectacle of colors.  The soul of this one is decidedly "mysterioso."

This next one is outspoken and brash and probably should run for President the next go-round, if only for a week or so.  This is like a belted song on the Broadway stages, and no microphone is necessary, thank you.

You can imagine the summer days of Bob-the-Artist as he weighs the best of these and looks for the excellent plant structure beneath these dazzling and seductive faces.  His garden is chock full of distinct faces.  His cup runneth over.

You've got to have a sense of humor when the weather conspires to punish your garden just before a tour.  We all chuckled at the sign on this fence.

This was one of my favorite stops of the whole convention, and it had the fewest flowers in bloom.  Maybe it's because I was started out like all those seedlings, in a country town where my grandparents got their fresh eggs from the chicken coop.

Sooner or later on a bus tour, the captain blows the whistle and it's time to say goodbye.  So little time....so many faces.

High Heat Gardeners

Kathy and I worked outside for about five hours today as the temperature went from quite warm to pizza oven!  She's working out a planting scheme for the big window boxes in front of the house, and I'm still racing to get my daylilies fully moved from University City and planted here. 

Some won't bloom this year.  Some will.  Probably none will die because of the heat stress of moving this month, but if they do, they don't belong in a collection of champions.  That's all I want to have here, champions.  That's the only sort of movie I want to watch, the only sort of book I want to read, the only sort of concert I want to attend.  Life is cluttered with pretense, incompetence, mediocrity, and failure.  There is no reason to infuse a life with more of it than one produces on one's own, is there?

I planted 115 daylilies today.  Here's my evaluation bed, partially full.

I killed the grass with glyphosate.  Rather than till the whole area and watch it erode, I'm drilling into the clay with a gasoline-powered earth auger.  I go down about three inches and drill six to eight holes at a time.  Then before the sun hardens the dirt into brick shards, I mix several handfuls of compost with the soil and set the plants.  Then I water with a wand.  I water every plant in every bed every other day for more than a week to assure that the roots have a chance to get going.

I've filled the two display beds and have begun to plant the beds in the back yard.  Down there the soil has not dried out much because of all the leaf mold on top.  The auger works easily and quickly there except for the moments when it encounters chunks of old Highway 94 about 5 inches down.  Here's the back yard today.

The bed on the far right is fully planted.  It's dominated by shades of lavender and pewter lavender with some accents of gold and dark purple.  The inner circle in the distance is ten feet across.  There's a crimson pygmy barberry in the middle.  Planted around it are soft pastels -- TAXCO (a white that seems a platinum silver lavender), BARBARA MITCHELL (a pink with a lavender veil), ROSE EMILY (a gorgeous rose pink), SUBTLE BEAUTY (a near white by my mentor, Oscie Whatley, from Tet. TANI, [which is from the same breeder as BARBARA MITCHELL and ROSE EMILY]), EARLY SNOW (a white by Patrick Stamile), and RIME ICE (a white by Oscie Whatley from Stamile's ARCTIC SNOW.)  You see, I create relationships in my garden.

The four beds around that circular bed all have a curved edge along the circular path.  I've planted the gorgeous pink JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS on that edge.  I believe I indulged in a stroke of political balance over there when I put PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN near "Jackie O."  Both flowers were named by Frank Smith, though Larry Grace was the breeder of "Jackie O."

The near four beds also have a circular bed in the middle.  The shrub there is spirea "golden mound" or some such phrase.  I'm encircling that with bright orange daylilies.  When I have enough of ELIJAH I'll use that for the full circle, but today I don't have enough, so it's a medley of bright orange ones.

The curved edge of the four big beds is planted in Oscie Whatley's GREEK EFFECT, one of his overall best daylilies.  A clump in bloom is spectacular, so twenty-some clumps will be paradise!

Here's one more odd feature of the garden.

Those white things are daylilies that were shipped to the wrong address two weeks ago.  They went to my house-for-sale in University City and probably arrived the day after I cut the grass and checked the house last week.  A real estate agent put the box inside the house but didn't notify anyone that there was a package there for me.  When I told my auction seller that the box didn't arrive here, he checked his records and admitted his goof.  He had my old address on file and didn't compare it with the correct address on my auction paper trail. 

Mistakes do happen.  They happen all the time.  My seller is sending another box next week to the correct address.  In the general scheme of things, this is not a big deal.  I hope in another month to have "after" pictures to complement this "before" shot.

Tattooing the Back Yard

Two weeks ago we moved onto a lot with an immense amount of planting space.  Our acre and a half is shaped like a wide slice of pie that is tipped downwards toward the tip, which is submerged in Hidden Lake.  When I considered how to map out a large daylily hybridizing operation on this sloped triangle, I thought of making a big, horticultural tattoo like the doodles I used to draw during meetings.

I enlarged the survey of the property and used a French curve to lay out a series of sweeping curves around the right side of the house.  We'll develop the left and right back yard first.

Yesterday I got down to business with a Bosch rangefinder laser, a tape measure, and my map.  The survey is pretty much drawn to scale, but "pretty much" was the cause of much figuring when it came to establishing marks on the grass.  For one thing, the concrete and rock swale that takes stormwater down the left side to the lake is not a straight line, as drawn.  Nor is the line of the fence on the left positioned accurately with respect to the brick wall.  The fence is gone now, but a line of straw shows where it once was.

My plan called for the garden beds on the left side to have edges 8 feet to the right of the swale.  Since the position of the swale was inaccurate on the map, my first challenge was to establish a straight line roughly eight feet from the rough edge, taking into account the evidence of secondary water flows on the grass.  The swale, you see, is a jumble of concrete rubble that does more to divert the water away than to channel it.

Then I tried to mark the location of Kathy's six vegetable plots, each 4 x 10, with 6-foot paths between.  With some fudging, I got them plotted and then discovered that the slope away from the driveway had forced my plot much farther down toward the lake than I'd imagined.

So I worked back from the shoreline, 15 feet, and laid out my big area for growing selected seedlings, measured what was possible, and marked the dimensions on the map.  Then I used up my two cans of bright orange "upside down paint" to mark deeply enough that something would remain after today's lawn mowing.

When Kathy and I looked at that design from the deck, we both agreed that we needed to change the design and try another idea there.  This morning I took a picture of the layout we saw.  I used the "pen tool" in an editing program to reinforce the lines I painted on the grass.

My big bed is about 50 x 50 feet in this view.  Each small bed is 4 x 10.  The new plan is to pull the right boundary of my big bed back from the lake another four to six feet.  Then we'll move the left set of three small beds onto the left side of my big bed, making the big bed a rectangle.  What's sacrificed from the big bed will be restored to the left of the veggie beds on the slope up.  I may terrace that area.  The new plan will keep the veggie gardening entirely on flat ground.