Alfred H. Goldner, a Class of 1941 graduate and avid horticulturist, met Jean Walsh at Michigan State University while she studied related arts with a passion for color and textures, and they married in 1941. While pursuing graduate study in horticulture at Ohio State University, Al was called to service during World War II at the U.S. Army's Plumbrook Ordinance Works, operated by the Trojan Powder Company, where he worked as a chemical production foreman. After the war he returned to Michigan and worked as a plant buyer for the garden department of the J.L. Hudson Department Stores in Detroit. In 1953, he and Jean founded the Goldner-Walsh Nursery in Oakland County, Michigan. Al became known as a pioneer, gentleman farmer, and innovator in Michigan's landscape industry, while Jean applied her design skills and her use of color and texture in their flower shop. Together they built a premier landscape nursery and garden center that provided training and experience for numerous college students of horticulture and landscape architecture. Among Al's contributions was introducing exotic plant materials into landscape design, including Japanese maples, rhododendrons, azaleas, hollies, dwarf conifers, espaliered apple and pear trees, and daylilies. Daylilies, or Hemerocallis, became one of Al's passions, and he gained fame as a breeder of many outstanding hybrids. He believed daylilies should be durable, beautiful, and bloom from morning until dusk rather than be restricted to being showroom pieces, and his breeding program focused on large, sturdy flowers with bright colors. He said his daylily flowers stood out in landscape designs even when seen by drivers traveling 55 mph. He also selected plants for environmental tolerance requiring minimal care, self-dead-heading of spent blossoms, colors that looked good under street lights at night, hedge-like growth, and quantity as well as quality. To produce his hybrids in quantity, Al opened his own tissue culture lab in Howell. His first hybrids were registered with the American Hemerocallis Society in 1979, and between 1979 and 2003, 15 of his hybrid selections were registered. He also introduced more than 50 unregistered cultivars to the industry. This collection contains many of the hybrids he developed over his long career in the landscape industry.