Leipers Creek Garden is the perpetuation of a hobby that started as a teenager with a small greenhouse that my grandmother convinced my father to build for me when I was 14 years old. Since that time my life has had many twists and turns, but the one constant has always been gardening and it's that interest that has resulted in Leipers Creek Garden.

Set in a rural setting just outside the village of Leipers Fork, 40 miles south of Nashville, Tennessee, the garden has been in the present location, a previous horse farm and B & B, for about 12 years. Across the road in front of the house is the historic Natchez Trace Trail and Parkway, an ancient pathway used for hundreds of years by native Americans and early settlers to transverse in the southeast United States.

The current garden was moved from another location "just down the road" in 2012 where it had been maintained as a weekend garden since 1993.

Leipers Creek Garden has been fortunate to have been featured a few years ago on the local TV show, "The Volunteer Gardener", and was approved as an American Hemerocallis Display Garden by AHS in 2004 and in 2006 as an AHS Historic Display Garden. Historic daylily cultivars have always been an interest and it's the historic collection of approximately fifty A.B.Stout cultivars and other older daylilies that were the focus of a feature article in the magazine, Country Garden, in 2008. Leipers Creek Garden is not only a daylily garden but also a "collector's" garden and for this reason there is a priority on unusual plants, trees, and shrubs. Recent passions have included adding more hostas, collecting variegated cultivars of Rohdea, experimenting with container grown lotus and creating a new miniature bog garden for pitcher plants.

Garden art is scattered around the garden and represents not only fun pieces but also finer works of garden sculpture. Working with garden art can be a little tricky and if you aren't careful your garden can quickly grow into what looks like a roadside sales lot of curios and trinkets. For this reason, there have been attempts to subdivide the garden into separate outdoor rooms which help prevent a garden visitor from being overwhelmed as they walk around the garden.

Finally, there is a small daylily hybridizing program that is done primarily for fun but has resulted in several AHS introductions, one being named after my grandmother, H. 'Rose Thurman', the same grandmother who facilitated my first greenhouse so many years ago. The focus of the hybridizing program is on unusual form, non-traditional, late-blooming cultivars but there has also been a recent interest in small UF's. with several showing promise to be future introductions.

It's obvious that a garden of this size cannot be maintained forever and as with most gardeners, plans are to downsize slowly but surely in order to make the garden more manageable without losing its integrity and interesting qualities. Meanwhile the garden will continue to be maintained by Jack and me, coexisting on 18 acres with a menagerie of animals, including two retired Amish Belgian Draft horses (Billy and Bobby), three miniature donkeys including Facebook celebrity, "Green Bean", an unknown number of indoor/outdoor cats and one large family of groundhogs. A recent garden visitor asked what horses and donkeys do, and the answer was what most of us try to do – simply trying to live our best life.

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