Avilla -- It took a while for Dorothy Koons to embrace gardening. Her childhood experiences with it were less than encouraging.
“My mother used to make me weed her rock garden,” Dorothy said. When asked how you weed a rock garden, she said, “Well, you pull the weeds between the rocks and I hated that job.”
Dorothy recovered from that early trauma and became a master gardener, and midwife to one of the finest daylily gardens in the state of Indiana. Her garden in Avilla, blossoming under the watchful eye of St. Dorothy, patron saint of gardeners, has attracted visitors from as far away as China and Great Britain.
And friends continually drop by to chip in with the effort. There are 50,000 varieties of the daylily. Dorothy has 244 varieties in her garden, 12 of which she created herself through hybridizing, all of them listed in the registry of the American Hemerocallis Society. Hemerocallis means daylily.
“I used the pollen of ‘Birdseye’ and the parent plant was ‘Common Sense’ and I named it ‘Josephine Finney,’” Dorothy said.
“Josephine Finney” after her mother, the rock gardener. Dorothy also created “Ida's Magic,” “Avilla Brickyard” and “Avilla Wind Dancer.”
‘I call this ‘Avilla Wind Dancer,’” Dorothy explained, “because it dances in the wind.
A daylily blossom may be short-lived, but each plant constantly puts out new blossoms so a daylily plant is beautiful all summer long. Dorothy also lectures on the subject and judges at state flower shows, so she's busy all the time. But it’s here she recuperates, and finds the inspiration to keep going.
“As long as I can walk,” she says. “Really, I love doing it.”
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