The story of For His Majesty Gardens began about 30 years ago, when Kitty and I purchased my childhood home, from my parents. I also probably owe the love of plants to them as well, as they still had a large vegetable garden and a couple small flower beds, when we purchased this country home in 1991. Over the course of the 1990's, my wife caught the plant "bug" as well, and we acquired a passion for dwarf and unusual conifers. At one time we had over 225 different cultivars of these needled beauties. However, some severe winters and numerous droughts have taken a toll, and we currently have about 125 varieties of hardy survivors. Simultaneously, we added about a dozen small flower beds with the conifers sprinkled within. Our favorite annual flower is undoubtably petunias. We currently have 80+ pots of them strategically scattered throughout the front yard, intermingled with the conifers and daylilies.

In 2015, I retired from teaching and happened to visit Solaris Farms, where Nate Bremer hybridized and raised daylilies. This inspired a whole new world for us, as our mental pictures of boring yellow and orange "ditch lilies" was shredded and replaced with elegant and unique images of these short-lived beauties. Kitty retired from her tax preparing job shortly thereafter, and this allowed us to both focus on the, almost 3 acres of flowers, each year. It was at this point that we decided we wanted to also hybridize daylilies and open a small daylily business. We've always raised all of our annual flowers in the 3 greenhouses that we own. So, by 2017, when we got serious about hybridizing, adding 1300-2,000 daylily seedlings to the annual routine seemed natural. We had a long road ahead, as my basic knowledge of science (from teaching 7th graders for 32 years) was only going to be a start, if we wanted to be anything beyond a mediocre hybridizer. Therefore, we joined the AHS (six years ago), also follow 2 Facebook websites focused exclusively on daylilies and like most everyone else, found very helpful friends in those experienced hybridizers already doing great work. We can't help but mention a particularly helpful veteran hybridizer, Ron Reimer, who was always willing to offer help with even our lamest questions.

Over the years, we've had many visitors, including a bus load of Green Bay Botanical Garden Members, two large local flower clubs, a bus of master gardeners from Iowa, two buses of National Conifer Society members and recently we were one of the featured yards in a garden walk fundraiser. As we've heard so many times, "garden people" are the friendliest people. It is so true. All of our visitors – from 3 states away, to our local customers who come every year – always seem happy to visit and we are so uplifted by their comments. We are frequently asked if we ship our plants and as much as I'd like to, because my wife and I are the sole "employees" (except for the very valuable help from my 86-year-old father), we have no time or energy to expand the business any further. It is also very motivating to actually meet and talk personally with the people buying our plants, as well.


To date, we have only registered one of our seedlings, but have plans to register 4 others this winter. It's amazing how much time it takes to get a beautiful blossom combined with good bud count and a hardy plant for our Wisconsin winters. And obviously, we're building on the shoulders of so many great hybridizers before us. Our breeding program started heavily with tets, especially ruffly edged ones. Our emphasis over the past couple years has also turned to the larger flat-faced dips that display so much color in their wide petals and sepals. And finally, our name. As we became a "stopping-off" place in our early days, we wanted to not claim all of the credit for the beauty being displayed. "For His Majesty", came to mind as a fitting tribute to God, the creator of our majestic daylily!

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