This morning, I had the incredibly beautiful opportunity to interview two Southern men. Buddy and Willie were cousins, raised in the same area of Florida. Buddy worked as a mail carrier for the United State Postal Service until his wife developed cancer. Finding it to be just too much to juggle her appointments and care with his career, he retired. While they struggled through her journey, he developed a hobby, growing and hybridizing day lilies. Hybridizing is a fancy word for cross pollinating or creating new varieties of the flower. By the end of this year, he will have registered 100 new varieties. He said that sometimes developing them is the easy part, the naming gets to be more difficult. Buddy said that every morning, he walks through row after row of his enormous daylily garden/nursery and picks the prettiest blooms to put in small vases for his wife. He joked that this habit has saved his marriage.
Willie, on the other hand, moved across the country 40 years ago. He settled in a little town in a mountain valley of Utah. Willie worked for a chemical company and raised his family, never forgetting his Southern roots. That would be impossible - his last name is Southern. About 10 to 12 years ago, Buddy converted Willie to his beauty producing pastime. Willie started with two small beds of daylilies. Now his habit has started to take over his property.
As I walked through the rows of daylily beds, I was very well educated about daylilies. I had no idea that these flowers could have teeth! The edges can be braided with gold or ruffled. The inside can be coated with angel dust. They have throats and eyes. To my knowledge, there were only two varieties of day lily - yellow or rust colored with yellow inside. Imagine my surprise when I was surrounded by over 1000 plants, representing 900 varieties!
I fell in love with many of them immediately. How could I not? They were beautiful! Each seemed to come with their own characteristics and personality. Some had thin petals (they are called spiders). Others looked a bit out of proportion (UFO's apparently aren't only for aliens). The colors covered every hue imaginable except for blue and green - no one has been able to develop lilies of those colors....yet.
I learned that hobbies and interests can make cousins appear more like brothers. These two could finish each other's sentences. I believe that the secret for their success in producing the breathtaking blooms is their Southern warmth and the love they have for what they do.
I looked at their worn hands with dirt around the fingernail beds and permanently etched into the ridges of their fingerprints. They were hands of men who had worked hard their entire lives. Buddy is almost 80 and Willie is just a bit younger. And even after they have worked for years, they are still striving to beautify the world around them, one flower at a time.
The process of hybridizing daylilies is not a quick task. The pistol, containing the pollen, from one parent lily is carefully rubbed on the stamen of the other parent. Both parents have to come from the same group (either diploid or tetraploid) or else it just won't work. The pollen travels down the stamen - kind of like a straw - and forms a seed pod where the blossom connected with the skate (stem). Then the seed pod is planted and the hybridizer waits until the following spring.
It is only when the baby plants emerge and eventually bloom (this can take two years sometimes) that the hybridizer gets to see what the cross looks like. And just like human children who come from the same parents, lily "children" can look completely different from one another. There can be oddities but Buddy says that those are part of the excitement because he has still developed something unique.
Then the lilies must bloom at least one more time before they can be registered, just to make sure that they will bloom again and look the same as they did the year before. It is hours of work and literally years of waiting.
Buddy and Willie both said that people approach them all the time inquiring about how to start their own daylily garden. The individuals want their yard to look just like Willie and Buddy's. Buddy laughs and drawls, "This is work - if you don't wanna get dirty and stinky, don't do this."
All that time, all that work, for what? I found out that daylilies only bloom for one day. One single day. And many times, the blooms won't even last an entire day before the sun literally "melts" them.
I asked them what makes all the time and work worth it? The flowers just last one day!
Willie answered, "It is so exciting to go out each morning to see which new flower is blooming and realizing that it is the only flower in the world that looks like that."
This Lily is named Little Pleasures. It is only about two inches in diameter but I fell in love with it. The lesson I learned from this story is that all the blood, sweat and tears are worth it, even if the beauty only lasts a moment, even if it is just a "Little Pleasure". In the end, there is still beauty and magic and maybe, the beauty is a bit more exquisite and the magic a bit more mystical because of all the work that was put in so it could exist, even if only for a moment, or a day.
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