By Jennifer Lester Mulridge
This article was first published in the summer 2010 issue of County & Quinte Living Magazine. Reprinted with permission.
“They come for the wine and stay for the daylilies.”
It’s a quip made by the farmer sitting at the head of the table, Canada’s favourite cultivator of daylilies, Barry Matthie. The 4th generation farmer lives on Matthie Road outside Bloomfield in Prince Edward County; an area enjoying its newly acquired status as a provincially designated viticulture region. Matthie and his partner, Maggie Goode, say the soil that makes the county a good grape-growing region also makes it good for daylilies.
“They’re the perfect plant for the county,” says Goode.
“Daylilies are hearty, low-to-no maintenance, drought resistant perennials that grow well in our rocky soil.”
Local residents aren’t the only ones eager to acquire the couple’s now-famous plants. Customers buying Matthie’s daylily seeds are largely from elsewhere. He says 80% of his customers are Americans who purchase his seeds online.
Goode says the people who order the seeds are the most hardcore of the daylily’s fans.
“Growing from seeds is hard. It’s much easier to order the plant clipping and have it sent by mail. Even if it wilts, you just soak it in water and the plant will spring back to life. The people who grow from seeds are real enthusiasts.”
Goode runs much of the operation at Bonibrae, but it’s Matthie who first started experimenting with daylilies in 1998.
“I started with eight plants,” says Matthie, “just out of curiosity.”
Those eight plants made way for the five acres now covered in blossoming daylilies each summer, sold by the bunch as cut flowers or by the root for later planting. Bonibrae is now one of the largest suppliers of daylilies in Canada and one of the only ones in Eastern Ontario.
“You do it because you love it,” Goode says of the couple’s full time enterprise. “It’s a lot of work.”
The popularity of the Bonibrae hostas quickly followed that of the daylilies.
“People would arrive to see the daylilies and notice our hostas,” says Matthie.
“Soon we were selling hostas right out of our own beds and we knew we’d better plant hostas to sell next year.”
Goode says visitors marvel at the variety of plants on the Bonibrae farm. People come during the busy growing season to sit in the shade under a tree and just admire their surroundings.
At the peak of the growing season, Bonibrae Daylilies & Hostas sports hundreds of thousands of lily blooms and about a thousand hosta plants on their sprawling acreage. The couple says the fragrant varieties can dominate the summer breezes at times.
“After a rainfall, all you can smell is daylilies,” says Matthie.
The couple started marketing their product in the early 2000s, with a modest appearance at the annual summer craft fair organized by the Picton Women’s Institute. The venture generated so much interest, the couple decided one of them would go to the fair and the other would stay home at the farm to meet the customers who frequently headed there after the fair.
“We’ll show our visitors how to hybridize and talk about how we got started,” says Goode. “Just make sure you call ahead if you want to catch Barry when he’s not on his tractor.”
Matthie’s hard work has garnered prestigious peer recognition. He’s won the Douglas Lycett award from the Ontario Daylily Society for three years running. He’s the only person to win it three times and the only one to have done so in consecutive years. He also takes home the majority of the awards each year from the Canadian Hemerocallis Society.
The couple has also begun to accept requests to speak at horticulture events throughout North America and recently agreed to host the 2011 annual Ontario Hosta Society picnic. Not bad for what is still a new company.
In their second careers, Barry Matthie and Maggie Goode are showing no signs of slowing down the pace anytime soon.
By Jennifer Lester Mulridge
This article was first published in the summer 2010 issue of County & Quinte Living Magazine. Reprinted with permission.
