Part 1, Pages 1-23 - AHS Region 2

STEVE MOLDOVAN’S QUEST FOR
A PIECE OF THE SKY
By Sharon Fitzpatrick, Canal Winchester, Ohio.
or more than 50 years Steve Moldovan has been blessed, or
some would say cursed, with a driving passion to create
Fquality, clear-colored daylilies that would thrive in various growing
climates. Steve learned the art of hybridizing by walking side by
side with daylily pioneers whose works many of us have only read
about. Over the years Steve has never taken credit for hybridizing
alone; instead, he states that he owes his success to the creations of
other hybridizers before him. Dedicated to his passion through hard
work, meticulous record keeping of plant parentages, and the unrelenting
search for the elusive blue daylily, he has only orchestrated
the gene pool created by others in a way they never thought of doing.
The best place to start this success story is at the beginning.
The Early Years
Steve Moldovan is a professional ornamental horticulturist whose
gardening roots stem from an onion patch located on a fertile ridge
of Lake Erie. Purchased in 1959, the property is now known as
Moldovan’s Gardens. Gardening has always been a driving force in
Steve’s life. As a teenager he preferred to grow gaudy iris and peonies
because he liked to see a lot of color. He had read about a
breeder of iris in the Chicago area by the name of Orville Fay. Steve’s
brother was a model airplane buff, and their father would take him
all over the country to fly his planes. When Steve found out they
were going to Chicago for a model airplane event, he begged to go
along so he could meet Mr. Fay and witness first hand the advancements
Mr. Fay was making in iris. By mistake, Steve discovered
daylilies.
When Steve arrived at Orville Fay’s garden, there was nothing
left of the iris but foliage. The Fay garden was, however, full of
daylilies in bloom. The young Steve was so fascinated by daylilies
that, during high school years, he returned each summer to Orville
Fay’s garden to help care for the plants and learn the ins and outs of
hybridizing. Steve knew daylilies were wonderful plants because
they took nature’s abuse without skipping a beat, were disease resistant,
resistant to pests, and did not require treatment with poisonous
chemicals to keep away the borer that so often hit iris.
Back in the late fifties, the hottest daylily was a seedling Orville
Fay referred to as SATIN GLASS, which was registered by that
name in 1960. Steve was in Fay’s garden the day SATIN GLASS
(Fay-Hardy 1960) first bloomed. Never had there been such a widepetaled
daylily. The flower was not the usual orange color but was,
instead, almost white. It was SATIN GLASS that hooked Steve on
the daylily. When Steve saw Fay’s wide-petaled seedling FIRST
FORMAL (registered in 1960) bloom, which was narrow by today’s
standards, he thought he had died and gone to heaven because, by
daylily standards of that time, the flower color was considered to
be pink. Using SATIN GLASS, FIRST FORMAL, its sister sibling
LAVENDER PARADE (Fay-Moldovan 1960), and Dr. Ezra
Kraus’s ATLAS, Steve saw his first seedlings bloom in 1958. From
this group of seedlings in 1960 he registered the cultivar BURIED
TREASURE (ATLAS X SATIN GLASS), the first of a long line of
daylilies, with the American Hemerocallis Society.
BURIED TREASURE grew and multiplied like a weed. By its
second year Steve had 150 plants. It did not take him long to learn
that black daylily seed was like gold to a hybridizer. An imaginative
man on a mission, Steve began the so far unknown practice of
incorporating evergreen daylilies from Florida and Louisiana hybridizers
with hard dormant, northern bred cultivars.
Steve finished his formal education at The Ohio State University,
and his hybridizing program was just beginning when he was
called up to serve in the US Army Reserve. Not wanting to leave
the garden but being a firm believer in “everything happens for a
reason,” a reluctant Steve was assigned to active duty. By chance,
Steve was stationed at a base in Louisiana located near the garden
of premier daylily hybridizer Edna Spalding. In his free time he
would drive or take a bus to visit Edna and her flowers. On one of
those visits Edna’s BLUE JAY (1961) was blooming. Steve thought
BLUE JAY was the most wondrously colored daylily he had ever
seen. Full of daylily dreams, a young and eager Steve was sure that
by using BLUE JAY in his hybridizing program he would have a
sky blue daylily before anyone else knew what was happening. When
Steve went home to Avon, BLUE JAY went with him.
Unfortunately, Steve was to find out after breeding with it that
the plant was a tender evergreen, and it died the first winter. All
SATIN GLASS (Fay-Hardy 1960) Slide: Howard Hite
Page 4 Spring-Summer 2004
Steve Moldovan’s 1961 BURIED TREASURE (Slide: Howard Hite)
AHS Region 2/Great Lakes Newsletter