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Daylilies: Hardy perennial has deep roots at family farm in Yadkinville
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Cas Booe grew up playing in the daylily beds started by his grandmother, Lola Holden, at the family farm in Yadkinville, which was a dairy farm until the late 1960s.
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Published: July 11, 2009
There's no question when daylily season arrives. It's trumpeted in highway medians, celebrated in front yards and even announced in drainage ditches. From road banks to barn foundations to the most meticulously maintained perennial borders, daylilies are everywhere this time of year -- and for good reason.
They are the cast-iron kings of the perennial flower world, able to survive drought, neglect, sun or part shade. They are highly resistant to the majority of insects and diseases. Simply, they are worry-free plants.
And though they will happily survive with a minimum of care, give them a little extra attention and they will reward you with a prolific show.
Daylilies have trumpet-shaped flowers held on long sturdy stems. The individual flowers last only a day, though multiple buds are produced on each flower scape. Individual plants will bloom for the better part of a month in colors of cream, pink, orange, yellow, red and every imaginable permutation in between.
If you don't care to leave this kaleidoscope of color to your imagination, then take a drive out to Holden Daylily Farms and Garden, just off Shallowford Road in Yadkin County. Signs will lead the way from U.S. 421.
Cas and Amanda Booe don't mind if you just come to look, but I have to warn you that the temptation to buy plants is hard to resist.
If you should succumb, Cas will be happy to pull the shovel off the old shed -- the same shovel his grandparents used when they ran the business.
The daylilies don't mind being dug in full bloom, and you can be assured that you will get exactly what you came for. With around 2,200 varieties to choose from, you might actually leave with a few extras.
Lola Holden, Cas Booe's grandmother, started collecting daylilies in the early 1950s, and her husband, Thomas, plowed up a circular bed to hold them.
She started with a collection of unnamed varieties from the back of a magazine. She had already developed a love affair with iris and had an acre established for selling and trading.
Daylilies were the start of something bigger, though. Cas said that his grandfather could get behind the daylily business.
"They're more of a man's flower," he said. "And Granddad really enjoyed them."
The farm was originally stocked with dairy cattle and was the first farm in the county to sell to Biltmore dairy in the early 1960s. It was a dairy farm from 1907 until the late '60s.
Cas remembers growing up among his grandmother's daylilies, playing among the sinuous island beds and finding hidden corners with flowers that have become his favorites. It is easy to imagine a child's world where these flowers are eye level and the fire of their deep throats stares directly into your eye.
The Booes started the daylily business in 1985. The daylily fields saw some idle days when Lola Holden became sick. The family was preoccupied with her welfare. She died in November at the age of 88.
Cas started to develop the wholesale part of the daylily business, trying to build up stock to sell to the state roads department.
"Some of the first highway roadside daylilies ever planted came from here," he said.
Cas pointed to a lower field awash in yellow and orange. "We used to line them out down there in that field. We took them Jean Wooten, because of the thick petals and stiff stems," Cas Booe said.
Jean Wooten has an almost leathery texture to its large yellow petals, but none of the brittleness of some daylilies.
"Just about the time we got up to speed with production, tissue culture came along," Cas said. Tissue culture involves the production of a great many plants from small pieces of leaf tissue in a laboratory and greatly expedites the process of production.
Today, most of their daylilies are sold to visitors who come by during the blooming season, from June 1 to Aug. 1. Many gardeners come to the farm year after year.
"In the early 1990s we had 7,000 people visit during the bloom season," Cas said.
Most of the daylilies are sold for $3 to $5, Cas said, with a few specialties going for $25. They try to supply at least a double fan for each customer. There are a few, like the variety Wild Pansy with red splashed on an off white background, that aren't available from other suppliers. These sell out quickly each year, and only enough are kept to maintain the stock.
Cas said that he and his grandmother used to ship daylilies fairly often because "they are so sturdy that they can be floating around out there for a week and it won't matter. We have dug them for people who said they were coming back and … and a couple of months later they were still going," he said.
"Rain or no rain, they are going to bloom," he said. "Even if you mow them down accidentally or on purpose, you can't really kill them."
■ Holden Daylily Farms and Garden is located a 3812 Hartmann Road in Yadkinville. For more information, call 463-5139.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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