Green thumb offering
A favorite aspect of the gardener’s life is being able to share specimens with friends, and Hickman routinely sells hers under the name “Libby’s Lilies.” She can be contacted by phone at 423-910-0004 or email at Ldbell123@msn.com, and welcomes visitors to her garden all season.
Featuring more than 500 varieties of daylilies, the four pristine flower beds surrounding Libby Hickman’s Ooltewah home make up a newly certified American Hemerocallis Society display garden, the only one in Chattanooga. What began as a small hobby in 1998 has blossomed into a work of passion that seeds joy into countless other lives, none more than those of her two daughters, Amy and Lauren, both past “Best in Show” winners in the youth category at the Tennessee Valley Daylily Society Show.
Hickman’s own mother, as well as her aunt, passed the gardening bug to her, and when she and her husband, Bill, built their home in the Clara Chase neighborhood in 2010, she began putting down roots. “We always had a garden and flowers growing up, but it wasn’t until I got my own home that I realized those things were what really made it beautiful,” says Hickman.
Passérsby and visitors remark on the colorful garden, but only two beds are visible from the street. The Hickmans’ property slopes gently from the front yard down to meet Wolftever Creek, and as the family developed the land to build their home, they created level terraces descending to the water, including space for a pool and flagstone surround.
Rather than a busy, cottage garden look, Hickman likes her plants spaced and orderly. A rainbow of blooms pops against clean black mulch, and beds are neatly edged with rock.