WALDO, Maine — Bill Warman toiled for 40 years setting and selling tile so that he could spend his retirement doing what he loves: breeding vibrant peonies and delicate daylilies in nearly all the shades of the rainbow.
Warman, 64, a grizzled Waldo County native, is just as colorful — though surely not quite as delicate — as the flowers he breeds, grows and sells from his business, The Maine Garden.
“This is why I retired,” he said this week. “So I could raise my own vegetables, breed my own plants and never have to go to work again.”
Of course, that depends on one’s definition of work. Warman, who lives with his wife, Lynn, on the 9-acre parcel located off a dirt road in Waldo, doesn’t lounge around and admire his blossoms all day long. He makes small mountains of compost with grass clippings and seafood byproducts and uses that to grow thousands of flowers, many of which he bred by patiently hand-pollinating many generations of plants to get just the right colors, shapes and sizes that he wants. His goal is to develop very hardy, beautiful and unique flowers, and the work is worth it, he said.
“It’s not the money that I’m doing it for,” he said. “There is nothing I enjoy more. It’s either like making love or being in heaven.”
Warman said that his knack for plants was evident when he was just a boy helping to tend the vegetables in the family garden. When he was still a youth, he cut his breeding chops on a slightly more controversial plant — marijuana.
“I got caught [by police] hybridizing marijuana, and that’s a fact. I’m not ashamed of it at all,” he said.
Since then, Warman has shifted his specialty to flowers. In mid-summer, his gardens are alive with color, as beds of daylilies — from pure white to pale yellow to a deep, dusky purple — wave in the sunshine. They are open to visitors and shoppers every day, except when it is raining, from May 1 to Sept. 15, and many have come over the years to see what Warman is up to. Terry McNeal and Ernestine Hooper, both of Searsport, stopped by this week to look at the daylilies.
“They’re perennials. You don’t have to mess with them,” McNeal said.
Warman dug up a mauve daylily with particularly small blossoms for the women.
“It’s very dainty,” Hooper said. “It just caught my eye because it’s so delicate looking.”
Over the years, Warman has planted many thousands of flower seeds and has used his own cultivars to hybridize many different kinds of peonies and daylilies, and more than 200 different peonies and 2,000 different daylilies can be found at The Maine Garden. He grows the peonies for his wife, who loves them, and sells the plants he has developed primarily to breeders, who come from many different states and countries to see what is growing in rural Maine.
“They come here with the expectation of finding something special,” he said.
The daylilies are a little different. He loves growing beautiful and unique blooms, and is happy to sell the plants to the folks who wander into his gardens. He also works every year with local nonprofit organizations, selling his plants but donating the proceeds to groups that do good works.
“I want to create something that has not been done before,” the self-taught botanist said of his desire to keep hybridizing plants and share them with the world. “A pretty plant to look at — that beats a bottle of beer all to hell every time.”
The Maine Garden, at 49 Old County Road in Waldo, is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day — except when it is raining — from May 1 to Sept. 15.