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.
Each variety has a tag with its hybridizer and cultivar name, most of them worth reading solely for their cleverness or whimsicality. A Hamilton County Master Gardener and member of both the Tennessee Valley Daylily Society and the American Hemerocallis Society, Hickman often collects unusual cultivars from fellow members, garden tour sales, trade shows and even farmers markets.
Daylily gardening is a celebration of the transience of the material world, with each blossom lasting only a day. Like a Buddhist monk ritualistically disassembling a sand mandala, Hickman walks through the garden every evening plucking the day's blossoms to clear the way for tomorrow's flowers, an exercise that takes over an hour. "Every day, the garden looks different," she says.
Teenagers Amy and Lauren spend hours in the garden weeding and cleaning up beds alongside their mother. Both girls have their own daylily beds too, full of varieties they each pick out and even new hybrids named after each of them.
While daylilies make up the better part of the garden, Libby Hickman also cultivates other species. Tucked away on the terrace below the parking pad, oakleaf hydrangeas, lollipop verbena, daisies, irises and other perennials accompany daylilies in a square formal garden. Rectangular stepping stones form a knot-shaped path, and a boxwood hedge sections off a row of rose bushes screening the pool beyond.
Under a canopy of maple trees, more hydrangeas, hostas and other shade perennials flourish on the slope of a hillside bed. Empress Wu hostas' giant leaves span more than 3 feet, and Lenten roses, columbine and ferns accompany other hosta varieties. Pots, boulders and garden art dress the shade garden and break up vignettes of plants. Near the drive, a newly formed "A" formation of lilies is still growing in a reference to Hickman's home state of Alabama both through the shape they form as well as their names, which all have to do with "the Heart of Dixie."
Toward the back of the property, a bed of hybrid seedlings from fellow society member Lee Pickles is coming to life near a bed of blackberry vines, an apple tree and a fig tree. Just out of sight on a lower terrace, a vegetable garden sports neat rows of tomatoes and peppers. The vivid hues, foliage and blooms of agapanthus, pincushion flower, native beebalm and a hardy banana tree in a bed by the fence draw the eye to the pool.
The family dines outdoors year-round under the roof of the poolside kitchen and dining area. By the pergola, a raised bed makes a home for more lush perennials, and red calibrachoa spills from baskets mounted on a wall.
From the immaculate condition of her garden beds to the sheer volume of thriving plants she maintains, Hickman's garden is impressive to neighbors and fellow gardeners alike.