One of the great joys life offers is when you can employ your passion for the benefit of those around you.

For several years now, Ray Hemphill has been doing just that: Welcoming flower lovers to his home off Highway 49 West to enjoy the beauty of the daylilies that have become so much a part of his life. Almost all of his daylilies are for sale, but whether his visitors leave having bought a couple dozen, or just having enjoyed the view is besides the point. Hemphill loves what he does and the people he meets through the cultivation of flowers and friendships at Ray’s Daylily Farm.

“I take all the money and use it to buy more flowers and fertilizer,” Hemphill said. “It’s really kind of a hobby and that’s all.”

Hemphill’s love of flowers started the way many loves begin when they start at a young age: He didn’t really like them too much. His mother was the person with the love of daylilies, but it was Hemphill who tended her garden.

“She loved everything about flowers,” Hemphill said. “She loved their beauty and how they made your yard look.”

But in his younger days, Hemphill said he didn’t exactly share his mother’s excitement about the beauty he was working to cultivate from the ground up.

“I didn’t really like it back then,” he said. “I didn’t really like digging in the flower garden except to make her happy.”

All that changed after Hemphill’s mother passed away and he was left wondering about the years of beauty he had sown making his mother happy while tending to her flower garden. Before selling his late mother’s house, Hemphill dug up all her daylilies and transported them to his house, even buying a vacant lot adjoining his home to expand his garden.

“Her friends would come by and offer me flowers, and I also bought flowers for 10 years,” Hemphill said. “I had the [adjacent] lot full before I ever considered selling one.”

All the while, the more flowers Hemphill accumulated, the more he became fascinated by them, but it wasn’t just the flowers themselves.

“Many people come to look at the flowers and walk through the yard,” Hemphill said. “I enjoy people.”

Before retiring, Hemphill worked a federal job in Warner Robbins that put him in contact with thousands of people. When he retired from the federal government in 1989, he began to look for something to fill his days.

“I worked all my life around thousands of people,” Hemphill said. “When I retired, it was quite a change.”

The flower garden that started unexpectedly the next year, in about 1991, put Hemphill back in touch with a special kind of people who light up his life each year.

“People who deal with flowers, who are interested in looking at them, the world needs more of them,” he said.