Al Goldner Biography

Alfred (Al) H. Goldner graduated from Michigan State College in 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture and a specialization in floriculture. As a student, he served as President of the MSC chapter of Pi Alpha Xi, the national floriculture honorary society. While at MSC, Al met Jean Walsh, whom he married in November 1941.

Al was a graduate student in horticulture at Ohio State University when Pearl Harbor was bombed—only 17 days after his marriage. During WWII, Goldner served his country with his work at Plum Brook Ordnance Works near Sandusky, Ohio, where he was involved in the production of Pentolite, a composite high explosive used by the military.

From 1945 to 1947, Goldner served as a nursery manager for Regner’s Nursery in Dearborn. Like Goldner, Anton Regner was an MSC graduate. Al was then hired by J.L. Hudson in Detroit and served as their garden buyer for five years. According to Jean, “Al learned a lot during the time he worked for Hudson's.”

In 1953 Al and Jean founded Goldner-Walsh, Inc., which offered both residential and commercial landscaping services, as well as unusual landscape plants. From the start, Goldner-Walsh specialized in broadleaf evergreens—long before other nurseries in Michigan were growing them. Goldner searched widely to find cultivars of azaleas and rhododendrons that were hardy enough to survive in Michigan weather. Goldner-Walsh also featured espaliers (dwarf apple and pear trees) that Al grew at his farm in Howell. Jean Walsh Goldner recalled that, “I ran the office and my mother helped with the two children. I couldn’t have done it without her. We had a wonderful opening in this area (i.e., metro Detroit) because we specialized in unusual things such as espalier trees, azaleas and rhododendrons. Many other nurseries didn’t grow them, so this helped build up the business.”

In an interview for Florists’ Review, Goldner emphasized, “We know the names of most of our customers. It’s service that people want these days. In the landscape business, that’s what is important, anyone can beat you at the prices.” Goldner loved his work and once told a customer that “although the resident was paying for Al’s landscape services, in reality he was paying for Al’s pleasure in life, which was his love of the landscape.”

Al Goldner received one of his most notable landscaping commissions in 1983, when Goldner-Walsh was engaged to create an overall design for 16 gardens of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, incorporating Victorian elements as frequently as possible. The project included creation of a daylily collection in the Tennis House Gardens.

Al Goldner retired in 1988, but Goldner-Walsh continues to be a premier destination for plants and landscaping services under the ownership of two of his former employees. In the mid-1990s, the Goldners bequeathed their house and surrounding five acres in Bloomfield Township to MSU to create the Alfred and Jean Goldner Beal Botanical Garden Excellence Fund. Al Goldner passed away on Nov. 9, 2003. He was survived by his wife and two children.

As a landscape nurseryman, Al Goldner’s goals in hybridizing daylilies were quite different than that of his contemporaries. When he started his breeding program in the late 1950s, the accepted fashion for daylilies was for fairly short plants with small flowers in soft pastel colors. In contrast, Al produced daylilies for landscape use, which required plants that could survive with minimal care, while blooming profusely for at least three to four weeks. He bred for plants with large flowers in bold colors that were carried on tall, thick scapes. As Al Goldner once said, “I want a daylily that stands out.” Good examples of “classic Goldner style” plants in the Beal Garden collection include "Carrick Wildon" and "Sears Tower."

Goldner also defied daylily convention with regard to his breeding method. At the time that Al began hybridizing (and largely continuing today), almost all daylily breeders relied on crossing unrelated plants with desirable characteristics, hoping to produce plants that showed the best features of each parent. This is called “outcrossing.” Goldner, however, used a technique called “line breeding,” which helps maintain or intensify desirable traits by crossing sibling plants, always going forward for many generations. As he once told a friend and fellow hybridizer, “This is not too hard if your initial parents are good and your selections down through the years are done properly.”

During more than 40 years of hybridizing daylilies, Al Goldner registered only 13 of his cultivars with the American Daylily Society. There are several reasons for this, of which two seem to stand out. First, Al thought that many hybridizers registered far too many daylilies, most of which were not sufficiently distinctive to warrant registering. Second, he was interested in creating new plants and simply did not care about the recognition and potential financial gain that came with registering them. As he put it: “It is for my own enjoyment only. And since I do not need the income, I just cannot be bothered with registrations and introductions. Ridiculous yes, but by the time I build up a stock of a selection, I find that it is probably superseded. Let’s move on I tell myself — and so I do.”

The vast majority of Goldner’s cultivars are known by what plant breeders call “garden names” — informal names, subject to change, that hybridizers use to identify promising plants, as opposed to assigning numbers. The fact that most of Goldner’s plants lack formal names that come with registration has led to confusion among daylily enthusiasts. The accompanying database was created in part to address this problem.

Biography by Robert Mainfort