After serving as Garden Tour chairperson at the Coeur d’Alene Garden Club for 37 years, Bonnie Warwick is no stranger to remarkable flowers. However, despite all her years of gardening experience, her Asiatic lilies still manage to surprise her.

Each morning, she is greeted by the permeating fragrance and fuchsia color of her 5-foot-tall flowers. 

“I walked out into my front yard and there was a miracle,” Bonnie said. “They lifted my spirits so much.”

Bonnie planted the bulbs a year ago, and the lilies have already shot up 5 feet with a remarkable abundance of blossoms and inch-wide stems. This struck Bonnie as an exceptional occurrence, as it is unusual for Asiatic lilies to reach this size within one year. 

She attributes the success of her lilies to her use of Coeur d’Green, a biosolids compost produced by the city of Coeur d’Alene Wastewater Department. This Class A soil is a byproduct of municipal wastewater treatment. She uses several buckets per year for her garden. 

“They’re just a wonderful feature of any garden,” Bonnie said of the Asiatic lilies, “a beautiful and positive thing.”

In her retirement, Bonnie continues to find joy in gardening and is always hard at work tending her home garden. She is passionate about growing flowers to sustain monarch butterflies, the state insect of Idaho, and finds solace in the beauty of her garden.