Retired football coach: ‘You look at this daylily, you’ll be hooked forever’

Retired football coach and flower enthusiast might seem like an unlikely combination. But Bob Goolsby’s obsession with daylilies has been with him for many years.

Goolsby is one of several daylily growers who will show off their blooms at the 13th annual Daylily Show, 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at Edgewater Mall in Biloxi. The show, accredited by the American Hemerocallis Society, will be set up in front of the main J.C. Penney interior entrance, is open to all.

Goolsby lives in a quiet Biloxi neighborhood where neighbors are likely to stop by for a brief chat while on their morning walks. His daylily garden, which has about 600 plants, is much smaller than it was before 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. It’s also in a different place.

“Before Katrina, I had about 2,000,” he said. “And I lost about 12 trees in the yard, but not one of them fell on the house.” The garden had been where the pool is now, an addition to the yard requested by his wife. The daylilies grow in rows surrounded by fig, lemon, navel orange and satsuma trees, and bird feeders popular with cardinals and jays. A small creek runs in a wooded hollow nearby, and the perky “breep” from frogs punctuates the stillness.

Here grow daylilies such as Suburban Nancy Gayle, My Cup Overflows, Suburban Main Street Church, and Boundless Beauty. If you’re wondering about those two Suburban daylilies, they were developed by Earl Watts of Hattiesburg, who owns Suburban Daylilies. Goolsby sometimes goes up to the Hub City to help out a fellow enthusiast.

There are at least two daylilies named for Goolsby, neither of which was blooming in his garden. The Great Goolsby is a coral-peach blend tetraploid with a yellow-green throat, and the Coach G, introduced by Watts in 2015, “is a beautiful double,” Goolsby said. The rose-pink tetraploid has a light-purple halo and a green to yellow throat. Its name is Coach G, he said, because that’s what players called him during his coaching and teaching years at Biloxi High School.

“When I started, people didn’t know how to pronounce my name, so I told them to just call me Coach G, and that stuck,” he said.

Goolsby grew up around daylilies.

“I’m from Carthage, and my grandmother raised them, and I would help her as a child,” he said. “Then we moved to Biloxi. My mother wanted daylilies but she worked in a clothing store and didn’t really have time for them.”

Goolsby began raising his own daylilies while he was still a coach.

“But I kept quiet about it,” he said, chuckling. “I didn’t need to be known as the flower man.”

What is it about daylilies?

“They’re beautiful,” he said. “They’re addictive. I tell people, ‘You look at this daylily, you’ll be hooked forever.’”

This story was originally published May 15, 2017 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Retired football coach: ‘You look at this daylily, you’ll be hooked forever’."