Daylilies have their day in Alpine garden

Reasons for gardening are as varied as gardeners themselves. This week's featured expert is no different. Marilyn Kofford and her husband, Lew, have developed a stunning garden at their home in Alpine.

Kofford's first reason for gardening was to help feed the family.

She started in the garden when she was very young, growing flowers with her father, Melbourne D. Wallace, and other family members at their home in Orem.

"My father grew flowers by the acre to put food on the table," she said. "I grew up on a tractor! I was his best tractor driver, and I still amaze my neighbors when I get on my tractor and work around here.

"My father started working on hybridizing some of these flowers, including the iris and the gladiolus."

Later, her father moved to Alabama and became director of the Birmingham Botanical Garden. He tried to carry on with some of the hybridization work with iris and gladiolus, but they didn't grow well there.

"He switched to daylilies because they did so well there. These flowers became his focus. We would travel there and help him put on the daylily shows in the gardens.

"When he returned to Utah after spending much of his career in the South, we took a truck down and loaded it up with 6,000 daylilies from his collection, including many he had developed himself."

This gave her a second reason to garden. "We brought all these daylilies back to Utah, and then my father did not come back for five years. He would come and plant the daylilies everywhere."

While her garden has evolved, she still honors her father by featuring in her collection seedling plants and hybrids he developed.

"All of the daylilies along the driveway are a tribute to my dad. He had hundreds of seedling daylilies that he never released, and these are some of those varieties," she said. "He worked with Sheldon Nelson and others at Brigham Young University, and we donated daylilies to them for their research and evaluation."

Her father sat on the board of the American Hemerocallis Society.