Daylily hybridizer, figure skater, dancer, musician.  Born on Dec. 26, 1937, in Oshawa, ON; died of heart failure in Orono, ON, on Sept. 15, 1998, aged 60.

    Main Street was in its fall finery, with people at little stands selling gourds and the new McIntoshes.  In the September sunshine, Orono, south of Peterborough, presented the sort of picture that says "small-town Canada."  Off Main Street people filed into the United Church, some from great distances, most local, the men wearing suits they would soon find too warm in the crowded church.  They had come to remember Doug Lycett, a local son; they would hear words they had
perhaps not expected.

    Doug, in an open casket and holding a single yellow daylily, seemed even in death younger than anyone of 60 has a right to look.  His partner, Henry Lorrain, stood beside him, receiving hugs and handshakes.  In July, at the annual three-day open house at their daylily farm, Doug had bounded up to me and, with his irresistible enthusiasm, told me he'd taken up figure skating again.  As a teenager he'd considered trying for the Icecapades.  (He'd been a dancer too and, after moving to Toronto in the mid-sixties, a singer on the Ronnie Hawkins label.)

    He was skating when he died, sliding to the ice, the victim of an unsuspected heart irregularity of the kind that had killed his father, also at 60.  Henry was at the farm, dividing up daylilies when the news came.

    The story of how Doug got interested in daylilies was part of his legend.  Eleanor LeFave, founder of Mabel's Fables children's book stores, was helping him choose
plants for his tiny Toronto garden.  Daylilies?  Those things that grow beside every Ontario highway?  "They're horrible," he said.  She insisted, and when his first daylily bloomed he was entranced.

    When Doug and Henry moved to the farm near Orono in 1984 (partly to be close to Doug's ailing mother), he made his first attempts to hybridize new daylilies.  It was after his mother died and he was at a low spot that he phoned Bill Munsen, a renowned lily hybridizer in Gainesville, FL, asking if he could come and see his garden.  For 13 years Doug, and later Henry, made regular visits to Florida, learning all Mr. Munsen could teach them.

    In Orono their lilies, petals ruffled, ranging from almost white to deepest burgundy, proliferated, taking over the pasture and providing the name for their enterprise: We're In The Hayfield Now Daylily Gardens.

  "You've got to come and see this one!" was always Doug's cry.  His enthusiasm was without bounds.  There was the fund he started for a local skater, Adam Colville; a recording session arranged for an 82-year-old jazz pianist, Glady Brown, who performed at the funeral.  Maybe in watching his dazzling performance people missed what had really happened.  It was for the minister, Rev. Mervyn Russell, to
make the point.

    Doug's first contribution, he said, was his return to his roots.  He had learned, said Mr. Russell, "that it was often hard for Doug, growing up in this community with his particular interests and orientation."

    When Doug lived in Toronto, Mr. Russell said, the first time he saw someone from Orono in a gay bar his instinct was to leave.  "But Doug chose to return and to be among us as he was, a man who loved this area, his flowers, his farm, his partner, Henry.  He came and lived in a quiet, friendly manner, and brought honour to us all."

    Love, he said, was Doug's second contribution.  Mr. Russell defined love as passionate caring, and added "such love, wherever it is found, in whatever form it finds expression, is always right."  Everyone who knew Doug and Henry "came to realize there was nothing to scorn or fear, but everything to respect and praise."

    The minister admitted: "Many of us have been on a journey regarding homosexual love.  I know I have.  Now I wish the church -- and I -- had found it easier to be patient, understanding, affirming and ready to pronounce God's blessing upon it.  Doug, in the way he lived, has made his contribution to that happening in
this community and this congregation."