Jul 2, 2015 3 min read

SCENERY HILL – Drivers headed down Route 40 through Scenery Hill who catch a glimpse of a massive flower garden on the side of the road often pull over to take a look.

The garden belongs to Linda and Michael Bodnar, who cultivated an expansive garden of hybridized daylilies surrounding their property. They said it isn’t out of the ordinary for people to stop and knock on their door to ask if they can look at the flowers.

They aren’t just locals either. People from Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and New York have been caught up in the allure of the Bodnars’ flowers.

If you talk a walk around the various flower beds, you will see nearly 1,000 different varieties of daylilies, with all sorts of different colors and patterns. The Bodnars achieve this through a process of hybridization, which allows them to grow flowers with the attributes they desire.

“Whenever we hybridize, we have two parents. We want to take an attribute from one parent and put it onto another, so that when the seed comes you might get something that is ‘wow,’ that has these attributes that you’re looking for,” Linda explained.

To accomplish this, they take pollen from one flower and put it in another. Pollination is typically a job reserved for bees and butterflies, but by doing it manually the Bodnars can make their flowers become whatever they please.

The Bodnars began their garden back in 2000. They previously owned an antique business, Pepper Mill Antiques, in Scenery Hill for 30 years. They sold the store and purchased new property in the area. They still operate their antique business on an appointment-only basis.

“It was huge, so we wanted to downsize and semi-retire,” Linda said.

While the flowers look their best at this time of the year, the work begins long before. According to Linda, they start working on the flowers in March. Then they will get up early each morning to tend to their garden, which is important to their hybridization process, as they need to get to the flowers before the bees do.

“Once the flowers fertilize, that’s it,” Michael said. “It can’t be crossed again with another kind of pollen by accident, so that’s why we do it early in the morning,” Linda added.

For many people, spending so much time growing flowers would be a way to make a living, but not for the Bodnars. For them, it is simply something they love to do.

“This is like our personal summertime obsession, we just do this for ourselves. There are people who make a lot of money doing this, I mean a lot of money. We’re just doing this for our own personal enjoyment,” Linda said.

The garden is not limited to just daylilies, as other kinds of flowers can be found there as well. To that end, it isn’t limited to just flowers, either. The Bodnars also grow fruits and vegetables. There is even a “shade garden” where more daylilies grow, which Linda said is there to prove wrong those who say the flower doesn’t grow in the shade.

When it comes to deciding what to grow and what attributes to share between flowers, they say it simply all comes down to their own preferences.

“It’s just what we personally think is pretty,” Linda said. “And there’s a lot of things that we think are pretty.”