Grace and I have always been interested in plants. When we were first married in 1967 and lived in apartments in Jersey City, NJ and Port Jefferson Station, NY we filled the window sills and any available space with plants: cacti, stapelia, pothos, monstera, etc. If it would grow inside in an apartment we grew it.

Buying our first house in Ridge, NY meant we really, for the first time, had a yard to play in. The farmers who we bought the land from dug out tomato seedlings that they had coming up in their garden and explained how we had to dig out the grass, shake out the dirt and plant the tomatoes. We had wonderful tomatoes that year and in true fashion became passionate about growing all our vegetables and fruit trees organically. We partnered with our friends Paul and Ellen Schlesier to form Giant Oak Farms and sold organic produce on the roadside out of a 1951 Fire truck and to health food stores.

In 1975 we moved to Setauket, NY to have a place on Setauket Harbor, an inlet of Long Island Sound, where we could dock our boat and engage in our other love, fishing. Our new neighbors in Setauket shared Hemerocallis fulva with us, our beginning with daylilies. But it was driving along Route 25A in Mount Sinai, NY that we spotted what looked like yellow daylilies for sale in white buckets by the side of the road. We stopped and bought them to add to our new landscape.

Retired teacher, Anita Davis, then 93 and the matriarch of Davis Peach Farms and an avid daylily grower was soon calling us every time she had a new daylily come in to bloom and we would drive over to see them and return home with new daylilies. This went on all summer. We were hooked but not quite reeled in yet.

In late August, we read a newspaper ad about a daylily plant sale by the Long Island Daylily Society at the Planting Fields Arboretum. We got to the sale a little late and had to settle for the few plants left on the table. It was the people of LIDS that made it special. They were all so friendly and welcoming. Then to cap it off, two members Gene Foster and Jack Pine, gave a talk on daylilies. I had never heard anyone talk about a plant so passionately and with so much good humor and fun. We were reeled in!

We were soon planting most of our Setauket yard with daylilies. We joined the American Hemerocallis Society and became one of the first AHS display gardens on Long Island and were featured in national magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Sydney Eddison's A Passion For Daylilies. When a lot in our neighborhood came up for sale, I wanted to buy it to grow more plants but we had no money. Still, Grace encouraged me so we cashed out our New York State Teachers Retirement account and Floyd Cove Nursey was born. Now we had land enough to grow and sell azaleas, rhododendrons, iris, hosta, perennials and most importantly daylilies.

We expanded our hybridizing programs which began in 1978 from a 20' X 20' vegetable patch to 100' X 200' plot of an old cauliflower field. We grew about 1000 diploid seedlings and 1000 tetraploid seedlings.

Every summer trips to daylily gardens like Van Sellers, Virginia Peck, Lucille Guidry, Olivier Monette, Elsie Spalding, Ken Durio, Ed Brown, Merle Kent, Bill Munson, Ra Hansen, David Kirchhoff and Mort Morss, and the Wilds cemented our love for daylilies and convinced us that the long growing season of the deep south was good for daylilies.

We thought we might like to grow daylilies full time when we retired from teaching so when the school district offered a buy-out by paying our health insurance, we opted to leave teaching early in the 1990s. Again, having no money to buy a place in Florida, we borrowed $50,000 from my brother-in-law Vic Santa Lucia to move Floyd Cove Nursery from New York to Florida. Three semi-trucks filled with daylilies were moved to Sanford, Florida.

Our hybridizing efforts doubled from 2000 seedlings to 5000 seedlings and we were in our glory. We soon learned to bloom our daylilies from seed to bloom in 9 months. A chance to buy a 28 acre climax live oak hammock in Enterprise, FL meant another move some 9 miles away. We were really in our glory now having fields of daylilies and we were now growing 8 – 10,000 seedlings and named varieties.

Grace and I had always loved California's mild climate and scenic views of the mountains. When it came time for our next move we decided to move back to California where Grace was born. Our place here in Arroyo Grande is on 5 acres and has what we love – scenic views of the Pacific Ocean and mountain ranges, a long growing season (what gardener doesn't love that!) and a chance to grow all kinds of plants new to us as well as our beloved daylilies. We have scaled back Stamile Daylilies to a hobby and our seedling numbers to 880 but we are having as much fun as we ever did. Our California Adventure has turned out wonderful. We have made great friends, enjoy a climate that allows us to be outdoors every day of the year, play all day in our many gardens and generally enjoy life.

In January you will find the Manzanitas (Arctostaphylos sp.), some Leucospermums, Grevilleas, Kunzias, Banksias and Kniphofias in bloom. We hope you enjoy some of the views of our garden. There is always something blooming here.

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