Background history:

'Indian Pumpkin' is a dormant introduced in 1983 by Wild.

This plant can be found in our Plant Database at:
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Indian Pumpkin') .

Please join in, if you own this plant! We would love to know more! I award an acorn for performance information posted to this thread.



Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Indian Pumpkin')

Got Indian Pumpkin in 2011 and it needs to be divided as it definitely has well over 30 fans in the clump. I've never seen rust on it. Begins blooming around June 21 in my zone 6b garden in southern Indiana and blooms for about 3 weeks.

I would love to know if anyone has successfully used it as a pod or pollen parent. As a pod parent, I tried to set seed on it last year, but each and every pod aborted. Guess that explains why there are no child plants. Not sure how it would do as a pollen parent, but if I think about it this year, I am going to try it. It is listed as a diploid, but I am also going to try crossing a tetraploid with it. Maybe the info on the plant is wrong since there is no parentage listed for it. A search in the AHS database does show that Wild registered 18 tetraploid daylilies before 1983.

Whether by coincidence or not, I could see a huge difference in IP's performance after the boards in our neighbor's fence began falling out. I think the extra hours of sunlight really did it some good.

6/17/2012 - the first year blooming in my garden.


6/21/2018 after 6 years, it hadn't done much - the fence is intact and is on the west side of Indian Pumpkin. This is a bad picture of it because it was 6:30pm, but it shows that it does fade as the day goes on.


7/6/2019 - that is the late-blooming Avalon Amber's Gift to the left of Indian Pumpkin.


6/28/2020 - slats in the fence are slowly working out/getting blown out and Indian Pumpkin is perking up!


6/30/2021 - Beautiful bouquets like this for the last week of June.


As far as bud count and branching, it did better in 2021. Or maybe I just took notice because it bloomed so much better.😉 It has always been a little top branched, but average is about 3-way branching with 15-18 buds. It does have sturdy scapes, a huge plus for me.





I bought Indian Pumpkin because I fell in love with the color of it and still love it to this day.

I remember you posting those before-and-after fence pictures of Indian Pumpkin in another thread, Vickie. I was hoping you'd review it here, and I got my wish! It's beautiful--I love everything about it.

Thanks, Nan!

@blue23rose I do not think you have Indian Pumpkin. ?
I grew that for several years and mine had a more crepe like texture.






It is registered as 23" tall, mine never even reached that, stayed more like 18 or so. Yours appears to be taller than that? Your blooms seem to have a more rounder shape, whereas mine was more triangular shaped. It bloomed down in the foliage for me, had sparse blooms, and the flowers melted easily. I had it several years because the color is beautiful but there was nothing else about it to love and I tossed it to the compost-didn't even give it away. Your bloom has a faint eye and Indian Pumpkin does not have that at all. Edit to say that none of the photos of Indian Pumpkin have the green color down at the base of the throat as yours does, and the anthers (I hope I got the right name?) are more heavier black color on your blooms than the other photos.

Thanks, Frillylily.

@beckygardener, if you wish to delete my review, please do. I truly thought all these years that my plant was Indian Pumpkin, but I certainly don't want to misrepresent the plant. I am glad that whatever I have is worth keeping, though, because if mine performed like Frillylily's, I would have gotten rid of it too.

I didn't get my plant from Gilbert H. Wild & Son, but as an example I was watching this P. Allen Smith youtube video called Types of Daylilies Grown at Gilbert H. Wild & Son and at the 1 minute 33 second spot, owner Greg Jones holds up a daylily and calls it 'Fooled Me'. Not only does it not look like the Fooled Me that I grow, it doesn't even look like anything in the database here! So mistakes get made and this makes me wonder how many people they've sold their version of Fooled Me to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Don't even get me started on G Wild. They have sold me SO many plants that aren't what they said they were. Luckily, I found this data base and can comb through things and fix attributions where I can.

Vickie - I am going to leave your evaluation of your "unknown" cultivar because it is a very good example of how plants can be incorrectly identified by the seller. And sometimes by the buyer. It happens. I don't know how many named daylily cultivars currently exist that are registered, but I know that there are a LOT of them! So it's good for people to be aware that this can happen. The plant you have sounds far better than the original Indian Pumpkin that this thread is dedicated to.

Thanks, Becky. That is a good way to look at it.

I did a search in the AHS database with parameters set at only "Wild" (this indicates it is Allen J. Wild - no Wild-G. or any other Wilds) and exact registration year "1983" (same as Indian Pumpkin) with 114 results. Can't imagine a hybridizer nowadays registering that many plants in just one year.

Zoia, I've never ordered from them, but have heard the same complaint. It is a shame if things have gotten mixed up over the years and people are not getting the real deal.

I went down the rabbit hole and have been reading about the wonderful, long history of the Wild family in the Journal archives on the AHS website. The following excerpt is from an article written by Allen J. Wild in the 1948 issue of The Midwest Hemerocallis Society Yearbook:

"We think one of the greatest drawbacks to the spread of flowers is the
word description in the catalogs. Many varieties are over-described, and an
equal number are under-described. We believe, also, that several varieties
should never have been introduced."

I just thought that was really interesting. I wonder how many other hybridizers think the same thing sometimes.

I had bad experiences w Wilds and I don't order from them anymore, they send the wrong things, and the customer service is poor, they don't honor their warranty.
After they sold a few years back, they seem to have lost who they were, as near as I can tell they got rid of all the old Wild's daylilies and they are near impossible to find now. Many of them I believe are lost.

As far as registering 'that many in a year', that is remarkable. I think however that back in the day they of course had no idea what it would evolve into, and the characteristics/stats for a daylily were far fewer than we have today. By todays standards there may have been many they registered then that they would not have even considered today. At least that is what I think. Even today people register things w low bud count, rust susceptible, and doesn't open well ect. I wonder what hybridizers from the 60's would think about the characteristics we find desirable now? The sculpted ones, or heavy pie crust edges that don't open and the spotted/splotchy looking ones? Well, I don't like them myself, but I wonder if those things had popped up on a bloom then, if they would have tossed them thinking 'something wrong with them'? Just think of all the 'blue' ones that aren't blue Maybe 50 years from now there will be real blue ones and then what? What will we name them

So true, Frillylily!! I have wondered what true blue daylilies would be named in the future. So many good names have already been taken, lol. Wouldn't it be great if the old hybridizers could chime in on the new daylilies? Like you, I'm not sure if I like the broken patterned daylilies and I definitely am not crazy about the heavy pie crust edges that don't open.

It is a shame that so many of the old Wild daylilies can't be found anymore. But maybe Mr. Wild introduced so many that were not really garden worthy that they became unfavorable in the gardens. There are some really good ones though, like 'Wild One', which I still need to do a review of. Hopefully, I got the right "One",

I now have the unpleasant and disappointing task of going back through all my pictures and renaming my so-called Indian Pumpkin as a NOID. I am glad that I never traded or sold it as such.

I have had a well known hybridizer tell me he had introduced plants that he now wished he had never introduced. But, I think that is understandable as our tastes and standards change over the years. I suspect many hybridizers feel some of their previous registrations should have never been registered. I don't hold that against them, it just means they have progressed and now feel their current intros are better.

So I had mentioned in my review about trying to set seed on my plant in 2021. That was with diploid pollen from Small World Aliens in the Sky and all four pods aborted.

This year, I tried setting seed on it with pollen from two tets, about 8-10. A few aborted, but I let 3 of them go all the way to dry up with seed. Just a ploidy test, so I didn't save any seeds. I have requested that my pictures in the database be deleted. I am going to change the name to a garden just as soon as I think of a good one.