Payne's In The Grass Garden

Leon and I have always been interested in gardening and we certainly started with a blank slate when we built our house in 1968. There wasn’t a tree in sight let alone any grass or flowers. We began slowly but gradually planted trees and added flower beds. We are kind of slow learners and our experiences were mostly by trial and error – with plenty of errors. I think it was just dumb luck when we succeeded at something. Then in the late 1980’s I happen to read an article in a magazine on daylilies and learned that they were available in colors other than yellow and orange. What a revelation! We tried and tried after that to find a source for these rare and elusive daylilies to no avail. That is until the AHS National convention came to town here in Houston in 1988. There was a big story in the Houston newspaper about the convention and while we learned that the convention wasn’t open to the public (it never occurred to us that we could have joined) they did list some contact phone numbers for some local daylily clubs. Unfortunately, the first meeting wasn’t going to be held until September – on my birthday – but we looked forward to it all summer long. It was really a wonderful birthday present – attending our first daylily meeting. At that first meeting we saw slides that made our jaws drop, learned of bus trips to area gardens, and saw all the food provided, and well, we were hooked. We’ve only gone downhill since then with our addiction. We bought our first daylilies from Mary and Eddie Gage and other early ones from other famous local growers – Inez Tarrant, Anna Rosa Glidden, Jack Carpenter (where we lost our minds from the wonder of it all) and we also were lucky enough to visit and buy daylilies from Elsie Spalding herself. When the commercial property behind our house became available we bought it since we had already run out of space for Leon’s seedlings – his main interest in daylilies – and hybridizing efforts. On a fortunate later trip to Australia to see daylilies and daylily gardens there, Leon came home interested in bamboo as well. That has since been an added interest – growing various clumping varieties of bambusa appropriate for our climate. Leon has registered and introduced fourteen cultivars of daylilies since beginning his hybridizing program all those years ago and some have been award winners. We have previously been a National Display Garden. But with age and the city coming in to install city water and sewer lines, our yard garden was pretty much destroyed. We decided it was time to downsize the yard garden and concentrate on the selling field and Leon’s hybridizing. It was really a hard decision but we feel it was the right one. We hope you will find something of interest during your visit or at least something to make you smile.

Paula Payne