Viewing comments posted by mbouman

The hydbridizer's description, from her 1939 catalog is as follows: "a full ruffled flower with deep yellow background, flecked and powdered with warm golden sepia. The darker sepals of burnt orange are most unusual. The whole flower has an almost embossed appearance that is very distinctive." The color classification code in the AHS sources is erroneous and should have been OYM2-P rev, if that matters. It is a reverse bitone involving sepia speckling on a deep yellow base, with sepal color so deep as to appear burnt orange.

"Little Dixie" is a region in central Missouri, where Frank Kropf lived.

I adored this daylily the one season it lived. David Kirchhoff refused to sell it to me that year because he was pretty sure it was too tender for my area. So I bought another plant and accepted Weaver's Web as my bonus plant. David was right, alas. This is one gorgeous daylily!

In the St. Louis area, Rainbow Radiance thrives in sun or shade. I grew it in the shadow of my house for several years, then tried it in full sun. Vigorous either way, and totally consistent in form and opening characteristics.

This is the first registration by Russell Henry Taft, who later suffered from Alzheimer's Disease. His wife, Sally Millman-Taft sent me the plant. It makes a fabulous clump.

If I still grew this wonderful daylily, I'd cross it both ways with Hanson's GUIDED BY VOICES, which does the same pattern thing in St. Louis weather.

A friend sent me a fan of this in September. Hard frosts usually hold off in our area until late November or early December. My plant suffered pretty bad crown damage over the freeze-thaw winter, and many tiny new fans emerged from the side and bottom of the damaged crown. These grew into a mighty fine clump that never suffered crown damage again. I suspect this is best divided and moved in spring, not fall!

Hybridized in Grain Valley, Missouri by the late Jerry Mix, one of the most enthusiastic boosters of Region 11 (Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma.) When Jerry passed away, our Region created an annual memorial award in his name for the individual who best exemplifies the positive contributions of our dear departed friend Jerry.

Companion daylily to Oscie's TIPPECANOE. "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" was a presidential campaign slogan for the infamous Indian fighter, William Henry Harrison, knicknamed "Old Tippecanoe" after a battle of that name. In 1840, at age 68, he was the oldest person to be elected President until Ronald Reagan, and the first to die in office. He contracted pneumonia as a result of giving the longest inaugural speech (2 hours) outdoors on a cold, wet day in early March, wearing neither overcoat nor hat, and died a month later. Tyler got to be president, too. (These two daylily names were on a whimsical list I made up one Saturday morning and presented to Oscie, who was flabbergasted at first, and then amused.)

If Oscie was correct in recording the seedling numbers of BONNE CHANCE and MY GIGGLER, then his notebook shows that BONNE CHANCE was not the pod parent, but a sibling was. The sibling measured 5.5" and was a round rose flower. The notebook has a question mark in the position of the pollen parent, so Oscie's designation of "seedling" may have been a guess. Although he registered MY GIGLER as a 5" flower, his measurement in the notebook says 5.5". He suffered from bouts of confusion in 2000, based I think on his atrial fibrillation condition which proved difficult to regulate. There are numerous mental lapses in the 2000 price list. Among them is a statement that the parents of MY GIGGLER were "Rose Impact x Bonne Chance." He might have had the reverse in mind (dyslexia was a factor) and intended to say "Bonne Chance x Rose Impact." He would still have been incorrect about the pod parent, but it is possible that Rose Impact was pollen parent because I've seen Rose Impact kids without veining and with much larger size than Rose Impact. A small mystery.

I'll never forget Bob Carr's extreme disappointment when he saw the flower he had named for his wife on the cover of the Daylily Journal with the name spelled SHERRY LANE CARTER. I think he told me that AHS refused to refund what he'd paid to have the cover picture.

Excellent plant vigor and consistency in my St. Louis area garden.

The scape is mighty, so a fan has to be mature, not young, in order to produce it. Thus, there tend to be a lot more fans than scapes, because the plant increases well. Low scape density.

When Mom's Mirth was a young seedling, I had to transplant it in early December to get it out of the way of driveway construction, and it came through the winter undamaged. It makes beefy plants and blooms these big, bright flowers for a long time, but pods are only occasionally possible as there is often no pistil!

This hasn't been an attractive garden daylily in my St. Louis area gardens. It's too low, the branching is too compressed, and the flowers often collide. Blossom form varies from day to day. Hybridizing with it as a pollen parent is another story. I consider this a hybridizer plant to be grown somewhere other than a beauty garden.

I obtained this well-named flower from the hybridizer, Bart Beck. The edge is somewhat darker than the petal color here, but I would not say it's dark enough to call it "burgundy." There is also a custard cream outline along the ruffled petals. Very good plant and scape and a very dusty blue appearance.

I have wondered if Oscie would actually have registered this daylily if he hadn't believed that his time was running out. He knew it to be an extremely slow increaser, but it was one of his best-looking seedlings and a break, considering that none of the other 32 seeds in the cross held any interest. I have repeated the cross with dozens of seedlings to look at and none anything like as fancy as this, though they all grow better. What a trade-off! The original plant had increased to 6 fans in 2010 when I obtained a double fan from Oscie's daughter.

Rose stamens from Tet. Super Purple are the distinctive feature of this daylily. Galeria is a Spanish word, though I think Oscie didn't realize that when he named a daylily for a St. Louis shopping mall named "Galleria." He spoke of the daylily as if he misspelled its name.

Oscie's notebook clearly shows the parentage as "seedling x GEX" (Great Expression). He reversed this in one of his price lists, which he was prone to do from time to time because of dyslexia. The correct parentage appears to be Seedling x Great Expression.

According to a careful reading of Oscie's notebooks, the pod parent was not ELAN, but a seedling. He wrote a note next to the seedling number "Elan great grandparent" and misread his note with filling out registration papers.