Allan Banks’s home and business, Harbour Breezes Daylilies and Japanese Iris in Salmon River Bridge on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, is close to heaven on earth.
From the road, you see a modest house and a shed with a big ship’s bell by its door. Dozens of daylilies grow in clumps around the front yard. This colourful, inviting area is only the beginning of the nursery and the display gardens that are Allan’s pride and passion.
Get a workout as you clamber up the steps in the steep hill behind the house. Many more garden beds brim with plants. At the top is the heart of Allan’s breeding and sales operation: a series of terraced areas with huge, carefully labelled beds. If you’re visiting in August, the gardens are especially awash in colour, as each daylily variety is planted out together, making big patches of hues rather than a cacophony of multi-shades. There are more than 800 varieties of daylilies growing here from breeders throughout North America, including 76 named hybrids that Allan developed and registered. There are dozens of other types of garden plants too, including perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees, vines, and water plants. But in high summer, the daylilies are the stars of the show.
The botanical name of the genus, Hemerocallis, means “beauty for a day” because each flower only lasts that long. But every daylily plant puts up many stems with multiple flower buds, and there are rebloomers available, too. There are more than 100,000 registered varieties in the American Hemerocallis Society (AHS) database, and more are registered every year.
Allan comes from a dairy and mixed farming background in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, where his love of gardening began. He followed another love, choral singing, earning a degree in music education, then pursued a career in Quebec and Nova Scotia, teaching mainly adult literacy.
He continued to garden, and developed an interest in daylilies, collecting a modest number of the perennial. This all changed when he moved to the Eastern Shore from Dartmouth in 2003 and decided to establish a daylily business, while continuing to teach. As his gardens and expertise grew, people began coming to him for advice and help with their gardens, and he evolved into doing more landscaping work while also growing his daylily business. He also joined the Nova Scotia Daylily Society (NSDS), a member of the international American Hemerocallis Society, becoming active in the group.
In 2007, Allan’s partner Shane Doucette bought the property next to Allan’s, giving him free rein to develop the rocky land. They now have about two hectares and the gardens keep growing. As has the NSDS. The board brought in special speakers, including hybridizers from around the daylily world. One of those speakers thought Allan should try his hand at hybridizing the plants. Initially hesitant, he began to experiment, registering his first two daylilies in 2011, ‘Red Edged Sunrise’ and ‘Violet’s Army.’ Those, like all his hybrids following, are available at Harbour Breezes.
As with any plant breeder, serious daylily hybridizers have specific goals. Basics include producing garden-worthy modern hybrids with clarity of colour, hardiness and vigour, plenty of branching of flowering stems, and lots of buds, plus flowers differing from what’s already available.
“Daylilies are one of the easiest plants to hybridize,” Allan says.
Most daylily flowers have six stamens (male parts that hold the pollen) and one pistil (female part that receives the pollen). If fertilization is successful, meaning the pollen travels down the pistil to the ovary, seeds form.
Every seed in a daylily pod will genetically vary from the others. “Two pink daylilies that are crossed may produce a seed pod with 15 seeds,” Allan says. “Fourteen of those offspring produce slightly different shades of pink, and a single seed produces a pure yellow.”
He explains further that even when a daylily is crossed with itself, genes combine differently, so the offspring aren’t clones of the parents, although some may look similar. Hybridizers can have plans for crossing two daylilies, but the way the chromosomes pair can provide interesting, unexpected results.
“Some offspring can produce ugly flowers and some may never produce flowers at all,” Allan says. Others handily survive winters in our East Coast climates, while the colder temperatures kill some. All these possibilities are part of the fun.
Walking around the garden beds at Harbour Breezes, one sees many plants tagged with marking tape and labelled with the hybridizing “recipe” of parent plants. These may become future seedlings and then registered plants. You’ll also see 1,000 to 2,000 seedlings in dedicated beds. Most seedlings will bloom within several years of germinating, and Allan will evaluate these plants for as long as six years before deciding to register new cultivars.
He composts the rejects or sells them to customers who don’t mind getting an unnamed variety. Allan says that hybridizing is best done in the morning as soon as the plants release pollen, and before the weather gets too hot. If rain is forecast, he likes to pollinate at least half an hour beforehand, because it’s much easier to transfer the pollen to the recipient flower. He says, “pollen can be collected all season long, and many hybridizers freeze it and use it the next year, especially pollen from late-season bloomers that they want to cross with early season varieties.”
For 2024, Allan introduced seven new varieties, bringing his total of locally developed daylilies to 76. They come in a range of colours, many with contrasting markings in the centre and on the edges of petals, and each has its own special, unique name. The versatile perennial comes in almost every conceivable colour except true blue and absolute black.
He says he can’t name a favourite colour but “as the season unfolds, new favourite varieties appear.” Given that he has planted a few dozen new hybrids from other breeders this year, plus his own crosses, it’s like Christmas when new plants bloom. Of his own hybrids, his current favourites are ‘Shane,’ developed for his partner, ‘Galactic Eclipse,’ and ‘Pink Triangle.’
As Allan’s daylily registrations increased over the years, he wanted to make a difference as somewhat of an activist. His philanthropy has focused on honouring Nova Scotians who have had an impact on landscape gardening in Nova Scotia. Looking through his catalogue on his website, a customer will note a good number of people now have daylilies named to fete them. These include ‘Robert W. H. Baldwin,’ the noted nursery operator in Falmouth; ‘Donna Evers,’ who with her husband build the meadow garden in Hammonds Plains (Saltscapes December 2021/January 2022); ‘Lloyd’s Hillendale Sunrise,’ for Lloyd Mapplebeck, former professor at Dalhousie Agricultural Campus and owner of Hillendale Perennials in Hilden, N.S.; and ‘Jodi DeLong,’ your humble scribe.
Another of Allan’s causes has been choral music. He’s named four ‘Coastal’ varieties for the men’s choir he helped to found (Coastal Voices Men’s Choir) with all proceeds from their sale going to the choir. He did the same for the Halifax Gay Men’s Chorus. They picked ‘Gay Harmony’ as a name for their daylily, with proceeds going to that choir. Additionally, he has named daylilies as a celebration of the LGBTQ2+ community with the naming of ‘Women Seeking Women’ and ‘Pink Triangle.’
Looking around the thousands of flowers in bloom, with sunlight glinting off the harbour that gives the business part of its name, Allan says, “Hybridizing daylilies can be personally fulfilling, and it can bring happiness to others who love this plant.” It’s no wonder people call daylilies the perfect perennial.