Blewline Nursery designs new day for daylilies

When Darrel Apps, hybridizer of popular Hemerocallis such as ‘Happy Returns,’ ‘Rosy Returns’ and the Woodside and Bridgeton series, announced his pending retirement, there was some question in the industry about what would happen to his breeding stock.

No worries. We’re in good hands.

Last fall, Apps sold his business in Bridgeton, N.J., to BlewLine Nursery and its sister company, Centerton Nursery, whose owners, the Blew family, have worked side by side with Apps for two decades.

“While we’ve partnered with Darrel for a long time, in recent years we’ve hybridized alongside him,” said BlewLine president Bob Blew. “Employing Dr. Apps’ Hemerocallis genetic stockpile and his priceless direction, we’re able to continue his work in a seamless mode. With the purchase of his massive inventory of seedling reserves, his name will carry much of the load throughout the next decade.”

Centerton rode perennial wave

Centerton Nursery Inc. was founded in 1975 by Ray and Marlene Blew on 9 acres of leased land in Bridgeton, N.J. Azaleas and rhododendrons made up 95 percent of the crops. During the 1980s, perennials expanded the product line many times, and the nursery expanded with it. Today, the farm is at more than 180 acres of production and nearly 700 different plants.

“When we first created the Trophytaker Daylily brand, we were dividing our own liners from existing potted stock,” Bob Blew said. “We would rope off the plants that we knew had to be saved in order to have enough divisions to pot for the following year’s demand. This proved to be both costly and time consuming, not to mention you sometimes accidentally sold your production stock. So we then searched for another grower to produce the liners for us. In the early ’90s, however, good bare-root suppliers were not what they are today. The material that we bought in was overpriced, inconsistent in size and not always true to name.”

Ray Blew saw the need for a good bare-root perennial supplier. The solution was forming a new company, and BlewLine Nursery Inc. grew from that idea.

BlewLine began field production of daylilies on 14 acres and Centerton Nursery was its only customer. It has expanded to many more cultivars of daylilies in addition to bare-root shrubs and other perennials. The company ships material throughout the United States and into Canada, though Centerton is still its largest customer.

Too many cultivars

The Blew family’s relationship with Apps extends almost 20 years.

“My dad, Denny Blew, had an interest in daylilies when perennials first started jumping up in the market in the mid-1980s,” Bob said. “He first met Darrel almost 20 years ago when he visited his farm in Pennsylvania and bought some of his newest and best cultivars. Dad’s interest in daylilies coupled with Darrel’s mass of knowledge about them led to a great friendship.”

From his extensive talks with Apps, Denny learned that most of the daylily hybridizers in those days were in the South and that many of the daylilies that Southern breeders produced did not grow well in the North. He also learned that many don’t flower very long, either. The average flower period for a daylily then was about three weeks. To make matters even more difficult, there were more than 25,000 registered cultivars.

Knowing that no nursery could grow them all, Denny and Apps sat down to brainstorm ways to select cultivars that would work for the grower and the gardener.

They agreed on seven criteria:

1. Reflect the beauty and substance of modern daylilies.

2. Prove hardy to at least USDA Hardiness Zone 5.

3. Not predisposed to pest problems.

4. Maintain an attractive appearance throughout the flowering season.

5. Guarantee prolific flowering the year of purchase.

6. Flowers at least double the length of an average daylily.

7. Promise at least double the flower intensity (number of buds per scape) than the average daylily.

Trophytaker brand takes root

Using this system, 25,000 cultivars were quickly narrowed to about 700, then whittled down to about 35.

“We felt this extreme attention to detail was important because at the time, many gardeners did not have the exposure to perennials like they have today,” Bob said. “So we did the homework for the consumer. We made the expensive plant purchases and figured out which ones worked and which ones belonged on the trash pile. The average gardener is probably not going to want to pay a hybridizer $200-plus for one plant, not knowing the true performance qualities of that plant.

“With this system, we made it possible for anyone to walk into a garden center to find a premier daylily at a reasonable price and purchase it with some confidence that it will perform for them,” Bob said.

From this exercise came the Trophytaker Daylily, which the Blews call the world’s first brand of daylilies.

Since then, Apps has selected more than 80 cultivars for Trophytaker, with nearly 20 of them being his own cultivars. The rest were selected from the collections of the best breeders in North America. Beyond that, Centerton has released 12 cultivars under the Happy Ever Appster brand, all of which are Apps’ creations.

Apps’ impact far and wide

Apps’ work with daylilies opened the market for new and more interesting flowers.

“If you ask a landscaper, they would probably name two cultivars in particular that have had the greatest effect on the market: ‘Happy Returns’ and ‘Pardon Me,’” Bob said. “Outside of the popularity of Stella, these two cultivars are among the most commonly used daylilies in the American landscape, and rightfully so. They are both solid plants: they bloom a long time, they are hardy throughout a good portion of the country, they consistently produce color year after year, and are fairly low-maintenance plants.

“If you ask a nursery like Centerton, I would have to say that his breeding for extended bloom seasons coupled with hardiness has made a huge impact on the sales of daylilies, at least here in the Northeast U.S.”

‘Rosy Returns’ was a significant breakthrough, Bob said.

“Not only does it bloom a very long time throughout much of the U.S., it is a super-hardy plant,” he said. “We have been told of one surviving and blooming in Zone 3b. But most importantly, it gave the gardeners of the North something other than a yellow or orange daylily that would rebloom consistently throughout summer.

Working under the master

Having a world-renowned daylily breeder living 5 miles away definitely had its perks for Centerton and BlewLine.

“I have personally been working with Darrel for a little over 10 years now. I guess you could say I met him while I was still a plantsman in the making,” Bob said. “At that time, my knowledge in daylilies was more or less minimal.

“Here at the nursery, we were growing more and more each year, and I took it upon myself to immerse myself in the subject to learn about how they grew, where they came from and so on. Over the years, my interest grew as I learned about the genetics behind it all. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. A few years back, I began breeding on my own. Tinkering more than anything. Under Darrel’s guidance, I built the tinkering into much more, to the point that it is now a breeding program.”

Last year, Apps decided to retire and move to his childhood home in Wild Rose, Wis. In excellent health, he plans to reacquaint himself with his hometown and family and do some writing from his life experiences.

A business transition had been discussed for some time, and the Blew family had already taken steps toward picking up the breeding work where Apps left off. “We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to acquire what is one of the most advanced bloodlines for hardy daylily breeding,” Bob said.

The arrangement was to purchase all of his stock, seedlings and yet-to-be-planted seeds. It was decided that BlewLine was best prepared to manage this huge undertaking.

“Over the course of three months, we dug, divided, replanted and inventoried more than 1,500 cultivars of daylilies totaling more over 200,000 individual plants,” Bob said.

New selections will be made for Centerton’s brands. Many new cultivars will be sold mainly to connoisseurs and other breeders.

“You have to realize that Darrel had a mail-order customer list that stretched into the thousands, and we would rather not turn them away,” Bob said. “On the contrary, we wish to continue to serve his customers much as he has the past 10 years.”

On the wholesale side, BlewLine supplies nurseries across North America with Trophytaker and Happy Ever Appster cultivars, and franchising the brands is available.

Apps not completely out of the picture

“Darrel loves daylilies and will be working with them in one shape or another for as long as he possibly can,” Bob said. “Along the way, he calls me from time to time and keeps me up to date on what he sees in trends and new plants on the market.

“The best guidance he could’ve given me has been his relentless efforts to teach me as much as he can over the last few years,” he said. “Though he won’t be the person doing the actual hybridizing, it will take me a few generations of my own work before I will be able to take much credit. Right now, I consider myself extremely lucky to ride the coattails of a premier plant breeder.”

Apps’ greatest contribution to the industry is still being played out, Bob said. “Because we will be observing his new seedlings through 2009, and also because it takes many years to take one seedling and get it to market, we will be seeing new Dr. Apps’ cultivars for probably the next decade.”

2 significant daylily breakthroughs

When Centerton Nursery started growing more perennials, it didn’t take long to figure out that longer-flowering plants were the best sellers. Longer bloom meant a longer salability window for the grower and longer shelf life at retail. And it meant more value for the consumer.

After many years of breeding daylilies with bloodlines built on ‘Happy Returns,’ breeder Darrel Apps began to select plants that flowered with similar intensity and time periods, but with other colors.

‘Rosy Returns’ was the first non-yellow, non-orange daylily to both flower for more than 75 days and to be hardy through USDA Hardiness Zone 4. That was the first big break. Using many of the same criteria that built the Trophytaker brand, the Happy Ever Appster brand helped the consumer find long-flowering daylilies that had a higher chance of success in the garden.

 “What made it even more important to us, is that in the South, reblooming daylilies are not exactly a rarity,” Bob said. “The longer the days, the longer the season, the more bloom many daylilies will produce. Here in the North, however, we are not as lucky.

“Darrel spent the better part of two decades working on this exact issue, and as he began to make selections, we knew that they deserved their own brand. And what better way to honor the man behind it all than to attach his name to the brand, though he wasn’t overjoyed with the idea at first.”

Another advance: Earlybird series

The next step in the evolution was the Earlybird series, which came from Apps’ extensive breeding for rebloom.

“The thought was that a natural way of extending the bloom season of daylilies would be to breed rebloom into daylilies that started earlier than most other cultivars,” Bob said.

What came of this program was a 4-inch red daylily that began within a day or two of ‘Stella D’Oro.’

{sidebar id=2}

“This was huge news for us because it opens up an entirely new market for us and a new choice for the spring gardener. It’s no big secret that the retail market trails off a bit after the school year is over. Our aim with this program is to have daylilies in the marketplace -- before June 15th -- that will have flower buds forming and quite possibly showing some color other than golden yellow."

The name Earlybird was chosen to highlight the early-flowering nature of these plants. Staying with the bird theme, each cultivar will get its name from a bird. The first is a red, Earlybird Cardinal.

BlewLine Nursery

Owners: Robert (Bob) Blew, president, and Donald Blew, vice president.

Key personnel: John Tighe, general manager.

Acreage: About 48 acres of production.

Facilities: All crops are field grown.

The only structure is a division/packing facility,

which includes 5,000 square feet of cold storage.

Crops: Major crop is bare-root daylilies,

but the nursery has expanded to include many varieties of iris,

hosta and tradescantia in addition to bare-root shrubs such as Syringa,

viburnum and Lagerstroemia.

Market area: Daylilies ship throughout the continental United States and Canada.

The company is set up to ship into the European Union,

“though that’s not our target market just yet,” Bob Blew said.

“As for the shrubs, because of bulkiness of the product,

we don’t ship much beyond 100 miles from our farm here in South Jersey.”

Employees: One full-time employee in addition to the general manager.

“From February through November we employ the same three workers

that Darrel Apps employed for the last few years.

They are really good workers, and we figured,

why mess with a good thing. During the digging season,

we often build up to around 18 total employees.”

For more: BlewLine Nursery, (800) 533-1132; www.centertonnursery.com; www.blewline.com.

- Kevin Neal

March 2008