Breeder Profile: Karol Emmerich

After more than 20 years of sitting behind a desk as a corporate executive, Karol Emmerich of Springwood Gardens in Minnesota decided she needed a lot more color in her life! Ever since she "retired" in 1993, she has been creating beautiful gardens and the daylilies that grow in them. Her goal has been to create large, northern hardy, fancy daylilies with great color, good scapes, instant rebloom, and inspiring  names. Since 2003, she has introduced more than 175 different cultivars, many of which have won awards from the garden judges of the American Hemerocallis Society.

Walters Gardens began working with Karol in 2006 and we have been selecting some of her best daylilies each year to bring to the commercial market.  We currently have over 35 varieties from Karol in production or evaluation and more are being added each year.  Since all of our daylily production is done from division instead of tissue culture, it has taken Walters Gardens 10 years to produce enough stock of ‘Storm Shelter’ to be able to offer it in our catalog.  Karol is also well known among daylily breeders as being one of the best breeders for fancy face daylilies for Northern gardens.