Posted on Fri, May. 09, 2008
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The Great Goolsby daylily honors Coastian
By TAMMY SMITH
tmsmith@sunherald.com
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How many of us can say we have a flower named after us?
Bob Goolsby of Gulfport is forever honored with The Great Goolsby, a big, ruffle-edged salmon-peach daylily named after him in 2005 by famed hybridizer Dan Trimmer of Florida.
"The Trimmers - they are the guys who raise hybrids," said fellow daylily aficionado and Mississippi Gulf Coast Daylily Society President Rusty Ingram of Biloxi.
"Bob visited Dan's garden, and he said, 'That one looks like it should be named after me.' Trimmer's son is a musician, and he's the one who came up with the name," Ingram said.
The two men were looking over Ingram's display garden at his home and discussing the Mississippi Gulf Coast Daylily Society's 4th annual Daylily Show, 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday at the south entrance of Edgewater Mall in Biloxi. Daylily plants will be sold beginning at 10 a.m. at $5 for fans, single or double.
If you think daylilies are pretty much limited to the ubiquitous yellow Stella d'Oro, think again. They come in a wide spectrum of the warm shades as well as some plummy hues. Some wine-colored daylilies might feature a chartreuse throat. You might see a golden bloom scattered with tiny flecks of sparkling gold, like an evening gown fabric.
Some petals are long and narrow, and they are called spiders. Others feature the wider, ruffled petal seen on The Great Goolsby.
"This is my type of flower. I'm a doubles person," he said.
For all the variations of daylilies, thank hybridizers.
"But not every daylily grower is a hybridizer," Goolsby said. "A lot of people show just so they can grow them and show them.
"You know, there are really about eight or nine different types of daylilies, and everything else is a hybrid. You could have a million and a half possibilities when you cross two daylilies," he said.
"But the odds of getting a really different one is about one in a thousand," Ingram added.
Goolsby has been interested in daylilies for several years.
"My grandmother was raising them in the '50s. I had been out of college about five or six years when I started," he said. Today he has between 500 and 600 different daylilies in his yard, and Ingram has about 670.
"But my yard is not landscaped at all like Rusty's," Goolsby said with a laugh.
