Hi Chalyse, Is this daylily rust resistant? Thanks!

Hi @bobjax

There's a lot of scientific information available about daylilies that were tested for performance with Rust, and also some for Spring Sickness. Keep in mind that a rating of "resistant" does not mean a cultivar will not get these diseases. "Resistant" only means that they were observed to get 50% or less of their foliage affected, and thus performed well enough to be considered acceptable garden and helpful breeding specimens. Resistant cultivars were seen to self-recover without any treatment and were found to be presentable for garden display with foliage trimmed to remove (and carefully discard) affected leaves.

As for Ruby Clare Mims, it has two "grandparents" that were tested, which you can see in the Garden.org database by clicking back through a cultivar's database entry for its parentage:

Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Ruby Clare Mims')

In this case, all of its "grandparents" have rust info:

Royal Renaissance (Ed Brown 1.3 x Enchanting Esmerelda [shows suseptibility])
Red Friday (Startle 2.0 x Fortune's Dearest 2.3)

So there are both one susceptible and three resistant plants that it was hybridized down from. Even though you may see rust, it may well be able to recover. If you find it has more than 50% affected leaves and does not recover on its own, you can update the entry in the database to "shows susceptibility," or if less that 50% rust and does recover then "shows resistance." You can ask the Garden.org or daylily Forum Moderator for instruction on how to do that.

Also, if you want to search for more cultivar rust performance scores you can select for these averaged Rust rankings in the Garden.org database. Or, you can search for all ranked cultivars in the Search by Characteristics page in the same Garden.org database.

https://garden.org/plants/grou...

More information about the sources of the rust scores is here.

https://garden.org/barn/notes/...

Lastly, scores for daylily cultivars that were evaluated for Spring Sickness/Leaf Streak are linked at the bottom of the post shown: here.

The thread "For Plant Admins - Daylily Leaf Streak Data is Available" in Plant Database forum (scroll up on that page to see)

Hope this helps, and that your Ruby Clare Mims recovers!

@bobjax P.S. Sorry, I just realized you asked this question in the database photo, so you may not have Ruby Clare Mims at the moment and were wondering if I ever saw rust on it! We don't get rust at all in our area (zone 9b in Northern California) so, thus, I never saw rust. And, even if others have seen or not seen it on any particular cultivar, there are many strains of rust in different parts of the country, and they have evolved and increased over the time since the rust scores were initially recorded. So, it is all relative because of many factors. However, that being said, its always great to start with plants that do have a rust score, or are descendants of those that tested resistant, even if it is some generations back. I do remember Ruby Clare Mims being one of my very favorite daylilies, both for beauty and good performance in my rust-free 9b garden. But, we had to downsize and so I no longer have my former daylily flower beds. Glad to see, though, that you are doing good research by asking about cultivars and caring about the health and vigor of daylilies!.

chalyse said: @bobjax P.S. Sorry, I just realized you asked this question in the database photo, so you may not have Ruby Clare Mims at the moment and were wondering if I ever saw rust on it! We don't get rust at all in our area (zone 9b in Northern California) so, thus, I never saw rust. And, even if others have seen or not seen it on any particular cultivar, there are many strains of rust in different parts of the country, and they have evolved and increased over the time since the rust scores were initially recorded. So, it is all relative because of many factors. However, that being said, its always great to start with plants that do have a rust score, or are descendants of those that tested resistant, even if it is some generations back. I do remember Ruby Clare Mims being one of my very favorite daylilies, both for beauty and good performance in my rust-free 9b garden. But, we had to downsize and so I no longer have my former daylily flower beds. Glad to see, though, that you are doing good research by asking about cultivars and caring about the health and vigor of daylilies!.

Thank you Chalyse! My goal was to create daylilies that are rust free in my garden. Through a lot of work I reached that goal. All in my garden are rust free, except two "control plants". Now my goal is multi generations of selfed Korea Flava daylilies because they pass the rust resistant gene. Almost impossible to self I got 6 seeds from over 100 attempts. I am now selfing one of the second generation seedlings which is bigger and more robust than the original. Although the flower is much bigger on the second gen the flowers are identical in appearance. I want a hardened plant to breed with that always passes the rust free gene.