Driveway leading to parking area and barn

Looking up the hillside from the lower garden

Hawthorn Hill Farm is located five miles from the upstate New York village of Cooperstown. We bought this lovely ten-acre hillside from close friends with the idea of doing a bit of gardening and perhaps building a house up on the hill some day. There isn’t too much room left on the original house site, since we were bitten by the daylily bug about four years ago and now have an exponentially increasing collection that will most likely hit three hundred by the end of the summer. Our aim is not to have the largest collection in the world. Rather, it is to grow and offer plants that we like at an affordable price, primarily to our friends and neighbors locally. We are particularly interested in daylily history and are making a concerted effort to collect species, their variants, and as many of the earliest cultivars as possible. Otherwise, we let our taste dictate what we add to the collection.

In addition to daylilies, we grow lots of perennials, have started an heirloom apple tree collection, and are happily saddled with an ever-increasing array of hardy climbing roses. Our large organic vegetable garden sits in the middle of the garden and more often than not visitors walk away with some free produce packed in with their daylilies. Benches and chairs are randomly littered about the place so that people can either rest in the shade while we are digging up their plants or just sit and enjoy the place. When we are both retired [two years], we will line the paths in the woods beyond the upper meadow with wildflowers and ferns native to the northeast. We are a completely organic operation, a choice rooted in a philosophical way of looking at the world and our relationship with it.

Display beds with rustic fencing and line beds

Upper meadow display with perennials

Display bed accented with hollyhocks

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site started May 2, 2003