Fall 2024 / Winter 2025
Dear Gardeners,
Welcome to Garden Path Perennials. As a Michigan licensed and inspected grower of perennial plant material, I specialize in growing and selling daylily and hosta cultivars. The 2024 gardening season was a challenging one due to the hot dry weather. But on the plus side, if I could supply enough water to the daylilies, they responded to the heat with generous rebloom. New 2025 introductions are being worked on currently. While I do not have names quite yet determined, the flowers and statistics can be seen in the top row of the Future Intros page. Check back soon for updates. In 2024, I introduced five new full form daylily cultivars. Each has a large flower paired with a strong plant habit. Hot Rod Red is just as the name suggests - a nice clear vibrant red. My white program continues to progress well with very promising seedlings and for this year, Mizzen Moonsail was registered. Just like the billowing sails high atop a tall ship, its flat blooms can be seen high and proud a bit later than mid season. Garden Path Perennials is also home to the 2021 Region 2 Englerth Award winning seedling introduced in 2022 as Quasar Redshift along with Plum Thunderstruck which won the Englerth in 2017. 2025 will see last year's Englerth winner added to the collection - seedling 17-69-01. My introductions are now available for Spring shipment. All have been updated to reflect 2025 pricing.
I am a long-time member of the American Hemerocallis Society along with being actively involved in both my local daylily club and Region 2 activities. Creating new varieties of tetraploid daylilies is by far the main purpose of my current gardening activity. It takes years to bring each individual hybrid through the phases of seed production, seedling growth, seedling selection and evaluation over many seasons, and eventual vegetative increase in preparation for formal registration with AHS and sales introduction to the public. My daylily hybridizing objective is to create very hardy, robust, and northern reblooming tetraploid daylilies with large flowers of great color, substance, and form displayed as a minimum of 20 buds per well-branched scape. I strive for overall plant performance to ensure a beautiful garden presence as well as valuable hybridizing genetics. I firmly believe northern daylily gardeners should expect similar extended weeks of bloom from individual cultivars that southern daylily growers commonly enjoy. It is through my work with reliable northern rebloom, under average growing conditions, in tandem with high branching and bud counts that this ideal is being achieved.
I work extensively with my own unique daylily introductions and seedlings developed over 27 years of hybridizing in zone 5b without the benefit of a greenhouse or acreage. I focus on selfs and watermarks because I enjoy the quiet elegance I feel they bring to the garden. All are tetraploids. Recently, I have expanded my work from round ruffled types to also include tall unusual forms. Those who follow my work or have heard me speak at various club meetings about my daylily hybridizing program know that high bud count, excellent branching, and northern rebloom are major hallmarks of my efforts. Since my introductions are registered with northern grown statistics, I would expect increased performance in warmer zones for the evergreen and semi-evergreen varieties. In addition to my website, I also sell daylily plants, seedlings, and seeds through the Lily Auction under the alias Floragin in the spring and late summer/fall seasons. (A daylily seedling is a full-sized regular daylily plant that has been grown from a seed which was intentionally created through selective breeding but has not been formally named through the registration process with the American Hemerocallis Society.)
I ship bareroot daylilies by United States Priority Mail Service within the United States. Canadian customers are encouraged to contact me about possible travel to Ontario in the spring and phytosanitary certificate inspection fees. Other perennials, which are mostly hosta, are sold to local mid-west Michigan zone 5 gardeners as freshly dug bareroot material from my established landscaping. Also, for local customers, if you find something special growing in my gardens that you would like put on a wish list, please let me know. You will be the first to be notified when that plant is to be divided in the future. Your visits are welcome, but please contact me in advance to arrange for a mutually convenient appointment time. Daylily blooming season in my garden is from late June through August with peak bloom occurring shortly after the 4th of July.
Happy digging,
