Growing Daylilies Together

A (not so) BRIEF BIO OF LANNY MORRY

Heavens knows whether anyone wants/needs to know more about me than I have already posted for my mydaylilies.com bio but for the curious, here goes!

I am English born, and became a Canadian as a small child in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where my father was a civil servant working for the UK as part of a team that saw that province become part of Canada in 1949.  As a result of growing up there I speak with a slightly detectable Irish/English accent that is a blend of the accent left by successions of Irish/English immigrants to Newfoundland over several centuries. 

I moved to Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada when my father took a series of successively more important positions with the Canadian government and grew up there living with my parents and three younger b rothers.

My love of both dogs and gardening, and my wanderlust and love of travel, comes from my mother Evelyn, who died last summer at nearly 92 years of age.  I was given a dog the day I was born by my paternal grandfather, and six decades later I still have a dog (or I should say, multiple dogs).  My son Mick and I have, for nearly 30 years since he was in his early teens, owned, bred, and showed and obedience trialled Avalonia whippets, and occasionally a Labrador retriever or Greyhound or two or three!  Our whippets are known for their soundness and quality and are consequently found worldwide: two went to Australia last fall, and our current litter of 8 pups included three dogs going to Poland, France and Brazil.

As part of my whippet obsession I maintain a 44,000 (and ever growing) whippet dog  pedigree database covering the breed from the first dogs officially recognized, back in the 1880s, to the present, and I have a database of 20,000  photos of dogs linked to those pedigrees.  I can trace any of our dogs today back the 25 to 35 generations it typically takes to bring my dog born this year back to their multiple great grandparents, Charlie and Lizzie.

In terms of my interest in gardening, my mother’s paternal grandfather was the assistant head gardener at Queen Victoria’s summer home, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight off the English south coast.  He was lured to Newfoundland by a wealthy family seeing a head gardener for their estate, and in that capacity he became one of the team of English gardeners who created the most important public park in the province of Newfoundland, Bowring Park.  Mom’s mother was also an exceptional gardener, and I well remember her remarkable terraced garden which began as a way of adding income to the family during the depression and continued for most of her life.

So Mick and I come by our gardening skills honestly.  As a teenager I became deeply enamoured of orchids, and began to grow them very successfully while I was still a university student.  I have had plant light installations for my orchids for most of my life so it is no surprise that Mick also developed a special love of orchids as he grew up.  Indeed, his first hybridizing efforts were with orchids, with the daylilies coming only after we lost all our orchids in a 19 day power outage in January 1998 that left us freezing in the dark as our house was then electrically heated.  The switch to daylilies, which can grow and thrive outdoors in whatever weather the gods can throw at us, began in the summer of 1999.

Today most of our orchids – I particularly like four types – from the cattleya, vanda/ascocenda/phragmipedium and paphiopedilum families – are grown in a 12 x 16 foot heated greenhouse attached to the boy dog kennel.  The greenhouse was made out of ‘found’ materials and was built for a remarkable $500 actual cash outlay.  Right now the orchids share half the space with potted 2010 introduction daylilies brought up from Florida in late March.  They will be planted out later this spring in the garden as we do not greenhouse daylilies.

I was educated entirely in Ottawa, and have university degrees in Journalism, and Communications Law.  I put myself through university working for Agriculture Canada at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa where I worked with the breeder showcase bulls (collecting for AI straws), and Holstein cows in the milk production unit.  I married Mick’s father during my last year in Journalism school, and divorced him two unhappy years later.  I am still happily single today.

My working career included four years working as a news reporter for several Canadian newspaper chains.   I was assistant bureau chief of Thomson News services in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa before I left it to take a government job with regular hours so I could be home more with my son.  I moved from journalism to regulatory law for the rest of my working career, first with the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission (equivalent to the American FCC) where I was a senior policy analyst in the TV regulatory branch for 16 years, before leaving to join the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where I became Director of Regulatory Affairs, responsible for 2500 broadcast licences, including our English and French radio and television stations and networks across Canada.   I speak English and French.

I made the decision to take early retirement from CBC in March 2005 so I could do other things with my life (I had just turned 58) while I was still healthy and could still fully enjoy them.  My philosophy is life is too short, and you only go around once, so do the things that turn you on so when you leave – and there is no coming back! – you depart with no regrets.

Since retirement I have devoted my summers to gardening and growing and hybridizing daylilies seriously on the 8 acre property I own in south end Ottawa, in concert with my son Mick and his wife Jennifer Patterson.  I have continued to travel to Europe and to Florida – five times in the past five years including four times to the gardens in the area known as Daylily Mecca during peak bloom season there, and once with my Mum, on her last trip south to the Gulf Coast before ill health overtook her.

I will return to England in late May/early June – and while there will combine my devotion to whippet dogs with my interest in great gardens, so I will take in two championship dog shows in England – one where a friend from Finland who owns our dogs is judging.  I also plan to revisit family haunts in the south of England where we come from in south Somerset and Devon, and visit historical and important gardens there all at the same time.  In future I want to return to favourite haunts I enjoyed in travels with my mother – the south of France, Greece, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Once back in Canada in mid June my focus will be entirely on our daylily garden, and especially on the seedlings that will enjoy their first bloom this year.  I photograph the gardens daily, which probably explains why the majority of the other 70,000 photos on my computer (not counting the 20,000 whippet photos) are of daylilies.

You can see some of my daylily introductions and futures on our website at www.avaloniadaylilies.com