Our next meeting will be on Saturday, September 19, 2026. Please join us for this in-person meeting at the Sycamore Hills Recreation Center, aka the Avon Senior Center, 635 West Avon Rd, Avon CT,
12:00 pm: Doors open for a social hour. It’s a BYO Lunch, but we’ll have light snacks and beverages.
1 pm: presentation by Gary Barsomian of the Boston area. He will discuss his program on breeding unique toothy daylilies with good garden character.
Gary has a wide variety of interests and manages to squeeze a bit of daylily breeding into his busy life!
Here is a closer look at how Gary was inspired to enter the world of daylilies.
My grandmother Victoria inspired my love of gardening – what’s not to love about fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from your own backyard? As an adolescent, I watched James Underwood Crockett’s Victory Garden on PBS, and his Time-Life gardening series gave me my first introduction to daylilies. I’ve been growing them for over 50 years, starting out by collecting Stout Medal, Popularity Poll, and All-America winners.
My professional training is in molecular genetics, and in the 1990s I worked as a principal scientist at Genzyme. I’ve also always loved working with my hands, and I’ve been a woodworker since 2000, taking on a broad range of residential and commercial projects. I love a good challenge and diving deep into whatever I’m working on.
Over the past three years, my wife Andrea and I have spent much of our time building a net-zero energy home for our daughter Carmen on our city property – we did about 90% of the work ourselves.
I began hybridizing daylilies six years ago. Much of our third-acre lot is intensively cultivated, and my collection is focused primarily on toothy cultivars, with a smaller number of ruffled or popcorn-edged varieties mixed in. At any given time, I’m growing approximately 4,000 seedlings for evaluation and selection.
We are looking forward to this intriguing presentation and connecting with our daylily friends!
Connecticut Daylily Society 