Arie Blom is a top hybridizer of one of the world's most popular perennials, but how he got his start in the business is a veggie tale.
Arie is a daylily breeder at Heemskerk Vaste Planten in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. After joining the company about six years ago, he now focuses on developing well-branched, reblooming or continuously blooming varieties that yield multitudes of flowers well above the foliage.
He worked with a number of vegetables for the first dozen years of his plant-breeding career before moving on to ornamentals. He founded a company, AB-Cultivars, which introduced many new and successful types of coneflowers (echinacea), bellflowers (campanula) and heleniums.
About two years ago, Arie switched to daylily breeding. Now he creates stunning, new cultivars that gardeners throughout the world enjoy growing. We at Breck's carry many cultivars from Heemskerk Vaste Planten in our Daylily Lovers collection.
He takes great pleasure in his work, as is evident in the brief but fascinating video interview below. A key topic that he touches on is the notion that hybridizing daylilies involves creating cultivars with all-new, never-before-seen characteristics.
In fact, he says, his new varieties have no unique features but, rather, different combinations of the same qualities found in other hemerocallis. See what else Arie has to say about daylily breeding: