My first attempts at making crosses were a disaster, it was spring 1997 after we had moved into the house with Fran’s mother, Marie Bozievich, to take care of her as she was 90 years old, fragile but ambulatory. I had transplanted all my daffodils from Virginia the fall before to Marie’s beds in Maryland that she no longer used. I had joined the ADS New Hybridizers Robin and was ready to start my hybridizing program. I made a number of crosses and marked the stems of each seed parent with the name of the cross, for example a stem of ‘Pink Silk’ would have a yellow plastic tab with a name of the cross, e.g., Geometrics. I still had a lot to learn about hybridizing. I dead headed all the daffodils except my crosses.
One day while I was at work on a sunny bright spring morning Marie and a friend when out to review the daffodils and dead headed all the daffodils. When I got home, she announced that fact when she presented me with all the yellow plastic tabs and said, “the names you had on each of these was not correct. I checked the labels on the rows, and all of these were named wrong on your yellow plastic so I brought them back to you.”
Marie was not a hybridizer and I had not mentioned to her that I was hybridizing. It’s funny now but it wasn’t funny then. Point made, I should have informed her. I never made that mistake again in the four years we lived with Marie.