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Gynith's Welcome to Kaye
and Bob
Kaye Stevans is a name that has been known to
hibiscus growers for many years.
Listening to the history by Wally Morgan, I see that you too
received that very infectious complaint so innocently - that of
the love of Hibiscus. His quote was: "You kept them
all!"
It seems that in the early 1980's you were immortalised in
Hibiscus with a beautiful flower of great resilience, texture and
colour - a flower named Kaye Stevans of which you can be justly
proud.
Kaye, today you are being enrolled into the annals of history
once again by the award of your Honorary Membership to the
Hibiscus Society of Queensland Inc. To me, the President of the
Society since it's inception on 18th April, 1993, taking pride in
the work being done by the members is of top priority and this
award today is truly another jewel in the Hibiscus Society of
Queensland crown.
I take great pleasure with the presentation to you of this award
of Honorary
Membership to the Hibiscus Society of Queensland Inc. and I hope
that our association grows into a wonderful and lasting
friendship for you, your husband and the Society, a Society where
you will always find a smile and the welcome mat at the door.
Congratulations.
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| Morayfield Magic |
Marilyn Faye |
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| Geoff Moor |
Bessie Biggs |
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| Herm Geller "Big
Daddy" |
Kaye Stevans
- Fiesta x The
Path |
The "Big Babies" |
Wally Morgan's brief
"History" of the Kaye Stevans
flower and Kaye Stevans, the person.
Hibiscus hybridizing requires a lot of luck with
only one in 40 or 50 new varieties usually worth keeping. In the
early eighties, when retired apple-grower and hybridizer, Allan
McMullen, moved from Tassie to Marcoola on the Sunshine Coast, he
promptly applied his experience to hibiscus, a new plant for him
in the new climate. He was immediately successful.
He took excellent parent plants like Fiesta, a prolific
orange single with a firm-textured flower and which also had an
excellent upright bushy habit, and applied pollen from some of
the then best American imports such as Red Bomb (a large
dark red with prominent yellow blotches) and The Path (a
large orange-yellow with lighter yellow markings) with better
than average success. Many of the varieties bred then are still
in circulation.
His problem was space on his small allotment and he regularly
gave 25-50 seedlings to his friends to raise to maturity and also
named many varieties after those friends. Kaye Stevans became one
of his friends then by a complicated set of circumstances best
told by Kaye herself. (Kaye gave a resume, at this point, how
tragedy and adversity introduced several people at the
Rehabilitation Centre with the end result she met both her
husband Bob and the McMullens...and that was some history!)
He named a prolific golden yellow cultivar of Fiesta x The
Path after her. She took many seedlings with her and I know
her loyalty to Allan after his death made it so difficult for her
to cull the not-so-good plants from her yard and they were
growing in the back-yard at Elliott Heads many years later,
unnamed, yet fond reminders of Allan's skills.
Others have taken the newer imports from America and found that
the Kaye Stevans is a good pod parent like its mother,
Fiesta. The likes of Herm Geller, a huge multicolour
honey-brown, yellow apricot edge and large, dark red eye, have
been used to pollinate it and at Lindsay's Hibiscus Paradise
Nursery alone, a new range of excellent hybrids has
appeared. Geoff Moor, Marilyn Faye, Bessie
Biggs and Morayfield Magic are all Kaye Stevans
x Herm Geller. These are proving popular this year as
new varieties at the South-East Queensland Shows.
The resilience of the cultivar, Kaye Stevans, is
reflected in the courage with which Kaye herself has fronted the
world for so long from her wheel-chair. I like to think that
Allan McMullen recognized that when he named such a resilient
variety after her.
Congratulations, Kaye, on your day for all those qualities which
make it a day well-earned.
Wally Morgan
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