To Roy Klehm in midsummer, ”Every day is a new beginning. It can be 100 degrees, and they will bloom. I forget about eating. I just want to be out there to see what`s blooming.”
The objects of Klehm`s passion are daylilies, those perennials whose ephemeral swept-back blossoms last just one day. But as each day passes, each daylily plant sends forth new blooms, for a total of perhaps 100 or more in a month`s time, moving Klehm to pass up breakfast and run out each morning to his test fields.
Klehm is one of three brothers who comprise the fourth generation of the Charles Klehm & Son Nursery, now headquartered on a 900-acre farm in South Barrington. The family was best known in the Chicago area for its nursery and retail store in Arlington Heights, but it sold its last acreage to developers in 1984, breaking a 132-year connection with Arlington Heights.
About 85 percent of the nursery`s sales consist of trees and shrubs to the landscape industry, but Roy Klehm has staked out perennial plants as his specialty and has become a world-class authority on hostas, peonies, irises-and daylilies. He sells his plants to some 300 horticultural firms and to the public through a retail mail-order catalogue he produces.
Klehm claims he is a grower, not a marketer, so when John Elsley comes to town, the newest varieties are shined up. Elsley is director of
horticulture at Wayside Gardens in Hodges, S.C., a company that twice a year mails out several million copies of its catalogues to American gardeners. Because Klehm uses the brilliantly colorful Wayside catalogues as another marketing outlet for his plants, it becomes understandable why Elsley gets preferred treatment whenever he comes to visit. A current Wayside catalogue features Pink Lavender Appeal, ”Wayside`s stunning new daylily,” on its cover. Inside, no superlative is spared (”breathtaking,” ”extraordinary,” ”vibrant clear color,” ”spectacular”) to entice potential customers.
”Pink Lavender Appeal was held off the market for five years to get the stock up,” Klehm says. ”Now there are only 4,000 plants in the whole world to sell. I was lucky enough to get one plant 10 or 12 years ago from Oliver Monette, a breeder down in Louisiana. I just wish he had lived to see it introduced. It is the finest pink daylily on the market.”
To reproduce his plants, Klehm uses tissue culture, a high-tech horticultural method of increasing plant stocks faster than normal dividing. Then he grows the plants to saleable size at the nursery`s field-growing station in Champaign.
”I recognized it as a good variety and had the foresight to have a photo taken of it that was truly spectacular,” says Klehm. ”It was shot by Chester Allen of Purdue University, who has been an agricultural photographer all his life but who likes to shoot flowers most of all. He uses a box camera, about 1928, but the results are fantastic.”
Wayside`s Elsley, who was raised and trained in England, has traveled the globe in his search for plants, so there is weight in his words when he says that Klehm, 45, ”is one of the finest young plantsmen in the country. I know of no one better.”
The development of the daylilies from weedy-looking plants with pale-orange flowers to showplace specimens has been achieved mainly by amateur breeders, several of whom started their work in the Chicago area after World War II. Through them Klehm acquired his love for daylilies, and after bringing the best of their plants to his nursery, enhanced them further through his own breeding efforts. He speaks with true fondness about ”six nice old guys.”
At a spot in Klehm`s home garden is a small clump of daylilies known as Golden Navels, the last daylily bred by one of his six nice old guys, Walter Jablonski of Merrillville, Ind., who died in 1986 at age 90. ”You`re looking at the world`s stock of that plant,” Klehm says. ”I bought Jablonski`s garden from his estate, and I promised him that if I found seedlings of his, I`d give him credit.”
Jablonski`s most famous creation is Stella d`Oro, a daylily with golden- yellow flowers that blooms a month earlier than other daylilies. It then reblooms in fall, a characteristic that Klehm is trying to breed into a current crop. ”I asked him where he got the name,” Klehm recalls, ”and he said, `The cookies were on the table at lunchtime.` ” The reference was to a package of cookies from the Stella d`Oro company that had caught Jablonski`s eye.
Another one of Klehm`s nice old guys, Nathan Rudolph of Aurora, is better known for his work on irises than on daylilies; his irises make up the entire 36-variety iris section of Klehm`s catalogue. In daylilies, ”Rudolph works mostly in muted colors, the oranges and tans, what he calls canyon and sunset colors,” Klehm says.
Another nice old guy was Jim Marsh, a Chicago plasterer who, before he died in 1978, grew his daylilies ”in a little-bitty plot” on the North Side, Klehm says. ”The names of his hybrids are each prefixed with `Chicago` for his tetraploids (Klehm`s catalogue lists 32 varieties that contain the Chicago name), and he has a prairie series for his diploids (tetraploids and diploids are plants with four and two chromosomes, respectively, in their genes).”
Marsh was the first to ”crack” the genetic combinations of the daylilies to develop lavender and purple flower shades.
The other three nice old guys are Robert Griesbach Sr., a plant geneticist at De Paul University who, Klehm says, ”cracked the reds and was the brains behind developing the tetraploids”; Brother Charles Reckamp of the Society of the Divine Word community in Techny; and the late Orville Fay of Northbrook, who all worked together on breeding tetraploids.
”Fay won three top gardening awards for his daylily work and two more for his irises. No one else has ever done that. He was a color expert who worked with colors in a candy factory.
”Brother Charles, whose varieties mostly have religious names, cracked the ruffles barrier (by developing a ruffled pattern on the flower edges),”
says Klehm. Brother Charles is now so famous in gardening circles that Elsley has put his picture in the Wayside catalogue. Asked about that picture, the brother, who is now in his 80s but is still breeding plants, says, ”Ah, I put it up in the basement to scare the mice away.”
”That`s the heritage given to me from early on,” Klehm says. ”I try to combine the lines of all these men, who each mostly didn`t stray out of their lines. For the most part, they never got around to using other people`s work.
”I saw a tremendous gene pool available, and I just stepped in and took advantage of their 30 years of breeding work. But it was 12 years before I registered any of my varieties. I did it for the first time last year.
”One of the real exciting things to me was finding what I feel is the best tissue-culture expert in the country, Bob Hartman. He wanted to move back to his native Florida, so I gave him contracts to deliver plants in the future, and he was able to use those contracts to get financing for his lab. He propagates all the daylilies for me.
”Very few people have been able to crack daylilies through micropropagation. We have that capability, and that`s how we`ve gotten daylilies to the forefront of American horticulture.” Cracking involves chopping a plant into tiny segments that are then placed in a sterile growth medium. If treated right, small plantlets form and are separated into a new growing medium. At a certain stage, the tiny plants are placed in foam trays, where roots begin to develop. These are then shipped to South Barrington year `round, 8,000 at a time, where they are placed in climate-controlled greenhouses and allowed to grow further. Eventually, they journey to the fields of Champaign for two years of development. Only then can they be dug up and shipped to Wayside and other customers.
To bring a new variety to the public through a normal dividing of the daylilies` roots would take 20 to 30 years to build up a sufficient stock of the plants, Klehm says. The micropropagation technique compresses that time frame to five years. Where collectors may pay $100 for a rare new variety, micropropagation can bring the price down to $15, putting it within reach of almost all gardeners.
Not all varieties respond to micropropagation. ”Some of my best ones don`t respond to tissue culture,” says Brother Charles, so the plants are left to grow normally in his half-acre garden along Waukegan Road near Northbrook.
Brother Charles, who credits his success to collaboration with Griesbach and Fay, says: ”The first ruffling was on Amen, and I used its pollen wherever I could. It`s like putting a piece of lace on a garment. It looks fancy to me, and I think it appeals to most flower growers.
”I`ve also worked for wide petals and open flowers instead of the trumpet shapes of old varieties. When they open widely, you see the entire flower, and the sepals stand out. My best success has come with the pastels, the yellows, creamy yellows, pinks and lavenders.
”Anything we develop that has potential, Roy Klehm will propagate. He and his wife, Sarah, have been very good in selecting names. Roy has picked some names from the Bible. I prefer that to naming them for people. How many people grow daylilies and know the people they were named for? It means nothing to them.”
All of Brother Charles` work has been on tetraploids. ” `Tetraploids`
doesn`t mean anything to the average gardener, but they have the potential for many more variations in breeding,” he says, noting that if you put two decks of cards together you greatly increase the number of possible variations.
”Dr. Griesbach mentioned that if you made the same cross on a plant every year, you would never exhaust all the possibilities for variation,” he continues. ”Tetraploids produce stronger stands, and their flowers have a heavier substance. An example is the bearded iris. Before tetraploids, irises were like a rag when the sun hit them. Now they hold up during a hot day. Also, you have the beautiful ruffling we didn`t see before tetraploids.”
The amateur breeders keep careful records of which pollen they carry to which flower through an intricate numbering system. But the system is too time-consuming for Klehm, and only a few of his crossbred plants are tagged.
”Numbers didn`t mean anything to me, so I just go by pretty on pretty,”
he explains. ”I know it`s unscientific, but I know pretty much what I`m looking for. I`ll give numbers to 10 varieties a year, and the others don`t get numbers until they`ve been picked twice.
”We have four locations and a couple hundred employees, so all the time I spend in the daylily fields gets to be a problem. I spend too much time breeding for the Klehm nursery in the short run, but maybe it will be good for the company down the road.”
Klehm has 190 acres of perennials growing at the Champaign site. ”The perennials and woody plants clashed, so we settled on Champaign for the perennials because most of us are University of Illinois grads and the land is world class,” Klehm says. ”We figured we could draw on the expertise of the university, and we have.” An additional benefit is the availability of enthusiastic workers, most of them the wives of area farmers.
”People have told me that we have the finest collection of peonies, daylilies and hostas in the world,” Klehm says of his Champaign operation.
”I think it`s a real feather in the cap for the Chicago area when you figure we`re in the forefront of three crops.
”I brought the hostas, daylilies and tree peonies into the company to this extent,” he says, adding that the family`s nursery is the largest grower of tree peonies in the country. ”It takes so much planning and organization to bring these plants on line and still pay the bills. But you do it for the love of the plant. You have to be half crazy and throw caution to the wind and delve ahead.
”My son quotes somebody, I`m not sure who it is, who says, `Argue your limitations, and they become yours.` I see no limitations.”
