SprottHaus: A Gardener's Journey

 In my last post , I talked about daylilies.  More specifically, I talked about hybridizing daylilies.   The act of hybridizing is super easy.  What follows in the coming years sometimes isn't. One of the best pieces of advice I got from a local hybridizer was to be brutal.  Don't save every seedling; few will be truly worth keeping.  Are you KIDDING ME?!  After all the waiting--about three years--to even get to see what you've got... and now I should maybe throw it away?!   Absolutely. Much like a good writer, one of the greatest lessons any gardener can learn is to edit.  As Elizabeth Lawrence once said, seeking out good plant material is as important as getting rid of the bad (super duper paraphrasing; sorry, Libba).  When a friend of hers was lamenting a poorly performing plant in their garden, Libba asked, "Are you cruel enough to be a gardener?"   I think about that quote so, so often.  When my seedlings bl...

Our back yard in 2001.  Meh. When we moved to our property 23 years ago (holy moly, has it already been THAT LONG?!), the landscape was... fine.  The overall design and plant list wasn't horrible .  But as a neophyte plant collector, it bored me to tears.  Although the first full truckload of stuff we moved from our old place was nearly entirely plants, I knew that I needed to wait and watch before making too many wholesale changes to the "new" place.  It's always smarter to understand what's extant and work with that. The same view 23 years later.  At least it's not boring! The previous owners were daylily fans.  I was most definitely NOT a daylily fan.   Who in their right mind would want to grow a plant whose flowers only bloom for a day?! , I thought.  Oh, silly, silly Past Me.  I had no idea how alluring the world of Hemerocallis could be.   That first spring and summer, I watched a couple dozen cultivars bloom in th...