NJ Jewish News | With a gift of lilies, gardener honors her immigrant roots

The flowering daylily is an immigrant, arriving in America from England in the 17th century. Now, thanks to a horticulturalist in Farmingdale, the plant gardeners know as Hemerocallis will decorate a patch of Ellis Island, the monument to so many other immigrants who arrived in the centuries that followed.

During the 52 years that Betty Harwood has lived on her 27-acre farm in Farmingdale, she has planted thousands of daylilies on the property. Now the tract is being sold, and Harwood has chosen to donate more than 500 of the blooms to Ellis Island, where they will enhance the grounds of the national landmark.

Horticulturalists and gardeners from the Battery Conservancy in New York arrived at Harwood’s farm on May 18 and spent the entire day extracting, labeling, and packing the plants. The group transported the flowers to Ellis Island on May 19; the actual planting began on May 23.

Approximately 400 of the lilies have been planted along the donor wall at the front of the island’s main structure. Fittingly enough, the names of Samuel Goodman and Rose Berdichefsky Goodman are inscribed on the wall near the new floral display; they are the names of Harwood’s parents, who arrived at Ellis Island from Ukraine in the early 1900s.

The placement was a complete coincidence, according to Sigrid Gray, director of horticulture at Battery Conservancy. Although Harwood had originally chosen Battery Park in lower Manhattan as the recipient of her gift of floral beauty, an ongoing park construction project mandated the selection of another location, and Gray helped secure the Ellis Island site.

Another 100 of Harwood’s daylilies were planted in the perennial garden near the west wing of the main immigration building, Gray said.

Harwood grew up in northern New Jersey. She studied horticulture at Rutgers University, where she met Milton Harwood, her future husband, who was enrolled in agricultural courses at the college. When the couple moved to the farm in 1954, they planted virtually every tree on the property, she recalled. Most of the 27-acre tract was used to farm a variety of crops, including rye, soy beans, pumpkins, and a large assortment of vegetables.

However, five acres were reserved for the daylilies. Milton Harwood helped design the floral placement; one area resembles an English country garden, another floral pattern surrounds a gazebo, and there are other colorful arrays along the driveway and at the side and rear of the family home.

It was a project that brought a sense of sharing and joy to the couple. But when her husband died in 1985, Betty Harwood decided to prepare the gardens for public display. Three years later, she began hybridizing daylilies. To date, she has hybridized thousands and registered several hundred that she considered exceptional in color and form.

Harwood named many of the hybrids after her family members, including Milton and their three children, Janet, Victor, and Laura Harwood. (The Laura Harwood daylily won a 2005 award of merit from the American Hemerocallis Society.) There are also daylilies that bear the names of her three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 1990, she officially opened Harwood Gardens Nursery. From 1990 to 2001, Harwood chose a single day in July (the peak season for daylilies) and hosted a garden party for an average of 400 visitors from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

“Those were special days,” Harwood said. “I loved it, and it was a way for me to share what my husband and I had created.”

She also began to lecture at garden clubs throughout the state and was a guest speaker at Rutgers University.

Although Ellis Island is the most recent recipient of Harwood’s generosity, over the years she has also donated flora to the Red Bank school district and Deep Cut Gardens, which comprises 54 acres of greenhouses, gardens, and landscaped tracts in Middletown.

As she watched the staff from Battery Conservancy remove pieces of her past, Harwood, who will make her new home in New York City, felt a stirring of emotions.

“These gardens really do represent a lifetime of work,” Harwood said. “But I think I’ve done a lot during the many years I’ve lived here. I’m happy and very excited that people will have the opportunity to see the daylilies at their new home on Ellis Island — that’s a special place too, for me and for so many others.”