Michael Bouman was garden-oriented from his days as a toddler in
New Egypt, New Jersey. His mother Edna was the only child of William Feaster, who had established himself as a veterinarian in the vicinity of
Jacobstown, New Jersey and then set up a trucking company centered on the cranberry canneries and the luscious tomatoes grown by central New Jersey
farmers. His grandfather retired before Michael came into the world, and was devoting himself to a huge fruit and vegetable garden where Michael first
discovered dirt.
On his tenth birthday, Michael's family moved from New Jersey to a new housing development in Levittown, PA.
His father Herman, an architect and hobbyist woodworker, made frequent trips to a local nursery to modify the layout of trees and shrubs that were provided
to every new house by the builders. There were no daylilies at the family home until Michael provided a few for his mother's birthday forty years later.
By that time his father had become an iris collector.
Daylilies were a "calling" that arrived in Sunday advertisements in the New York Times. "Hundreds of blooms on
every plant," said the ads, and Michael recognized the common roadside daylily in the illustration and wondered why anyone had to pay for such a plant.
From his late teens onward, Michael was aware of common daylilies, but he encountered his first real collection at a friend's home in Durango, Colorado
while employed there as a college choral director in 1971. He found them languishing without bloom in his desert-like back yard in Santa Fe, New Mexico
three years later. And he found them spreading through an abandoned farmstead near his rental home in Vermont, where he moved in 1977 for a career change.
Three months later he dug hundreds of those abandoned plants and peppered his landscape with them at his new
place in Hyde Park, Vermont. He bought a packet of daylily seeds from Park's catalog in the 1980s and learned to grow and evaluate the resulting plants.
He couldn't afford a "real" collection then, but he did buy a pot of HYPERION, his first hybrid. Vegetables were the main gardening interest then.
He began to collect daylilies in 1992 on a short trip to Vermont Daylilies, a plantation operated by Lewis and
Nancy Hill, the authors of Daylilies: The Perfect Perennial. He joined AHS and started to hybridize in 1994, but just after planting that seedling crop
in 1995 he made a career move to St. Louis, where he met and befriended Oscie Whatley.
Whatley was the preeminent hybridizer in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma during the 1970s into the 1990s. He
accumulated more cultivar awards than any other individual hybridizer in that three-state region. With Whatley's help, Michael restarted his hybridizing
in 1997. One of his goals involved expanding on Whatley's excellent work. He built a hybridizing collection around the best plants of the previous decade,
such as Jack Carpenter's diploid Catherine Neal, Ra Hansen's Tuscawilla Blackout, Sara Sikes's Sound and Fury, and Jeff Salter's Spanish Glow, to name a
few. He grew his seedling crops on donated space for thirteen years until his retirement in 2010 and a move to a spacious property in the St. Louis suburbs.
He got lucky with his first crop. Ultimately there were three registrations in that crop, one from the Whatley
lines, and Whatley intros figured in his registrations from then on. Additionally, Michael has built much of his program on Ohio daylilies from Steve Moldovan,
Richard Norris and Curt Hanson, plus northern breeders such as Don Church, Melanie Mason, Karol Emmerich, Mike Derrow, and Phil and Luella Korth.
He is currently downsizing a collection of over 800 cultivars. He raises 2,000 seedlings a year and keeps no
more than a hundred. He registers plants when he has at least ten double fans lined out. He is interested in all colors and in larger flowers, with a
particular love of breeding for blue tones. He likes odd colors when they turn up and is very fond of a "bruin" pink daylily named BLUES IN THE NEWS.
He has a dark orangey brown seedling that reminds him of barbequed ribs. He does not work with teeth, double daylilies, or small ones, and his work with
diploids and unusual forms is minimal.
Mike Derrow, Dan Robarts, and Paul Aucoin are three friends who have given him seeds from their programs over
the years. Several of his intros came from their seeds or from seeds he bought on the Lily Auction. Of his 2000 seedlings a year, probably 400 are the
product of his good friends' work. He always allows room for their genetics, believing that the products of friendship are more important than the
exclusivity of growing only his own crosses.
Michael's home garden is not open for direct sales, but he and his wife Karen welcome visitors by appointment.
Michael has written numerous articles about Oscie Whatley, beginning with a profile in the Daylily Journal,
Winter 1999, Vol 54, No. 4. After Whatley's death in 2005 he was given access to Whatley's garden notebooks and slides. He scanned and organized the
notebooks and published four study guides to Whatley's career and methods. Those materials are available in PDF format for download from the Library
section of Michael's website (see below).
Retirement from daylilies will come when Mother Nature says, "it's time".
