Review of the Hardy Daylily Garden in Connecticut

Posted by admin on August 14, 2009

Here is our review of the Hardy Daylily Garden in Connecticut. Our garden reviews are posted when we’ve gone to a garden we feel really stands out. The Hardy Daylily Garden in Connecticut stood out to us as an outstanding local garden.

This family run business totally surprised us. In our opinion, we thought it would be small, but it wasn’t. It was a nice size garden for the person who wants to buy enough plants to fill their car or truck. The plants we bought were from both the front and back gardens.

The way it works is that they’re only open select days during the summer, their garden being a part time open business. We walked around and Mr. Hardy was friendly and helpful. He showed us very interesting seedlings he was working on breeding. He let us know which were his named varieties, some named after local towns. The person digging our plants showed us quite a number of interesting plants to consider.

Most importantly the Hardys were so generous for a northern garden. As everyone knows, gardens in the north don’t get the same increase as those further south. With a winter and short growing season, gardens in the north are lucky to get plants to double in size each year. Gardens in the south can have plants triple or quadruple in a year due to the long growing season.

The plants we purchased were dug out of the ground in front of us. They took off a bit of soil and left most soil on the roots. The plants were each bagged and labeled. They were sturdy, healthy plants. My Hardy mentioned various organic soil treatments he uses to get long lasting healthy plants. There was even one plant he sold us that was the last they had. They divided the plant in front of us and gave us the best half, only keeping one fan for their garden.

We are located in California, so we actually had to remove the soil from the roots and ship them to our show garden.  We chose all evergreen varieties since our growing season is year round. All plants are growing beautifully, some even reblooming in the same year.

We spent hours in their garden. Luckily we had brought lunch with us so the Hardys let us know where we could go nearby to eat, which was the great falls. It was only less than mile drive away. It was very cool, kind of like a falls about 1/5 the size of Niagara Falls. We also took a short walk up the Appalachian Trail which was very close to their house.

That area of Connecticut was so very scenic. We did make a day of this trip, visiting antique stores and parks on our way home. An amazing day. Here is their Website.