For a week or so I have been noticing some strange things about many of the blooms in my garden, and the problem seems to be growing.
I am becoming concerned about it and was wanting to ask if anyone has had or is having this happen in their garden this year.
I took pictures this morning to illustrate the problem, a picture is worth a thousand words they say. I will still add a few words also. I took these photos just before and just after 10:00 am this morning. So the blooms would normally be open on most of my plants by that time. However many blooms, not just the few in the photos just are only opening part way, they are very pale and washed out, they are weak and in many cases totally unrecognizable to me without just knowing the location or seeing the name plate.
So here are the photos:
'Infield Fly Rule':

'Night Wings':

'Sue Rothbauer':

'Spiny Sea Urchin:

'Panic In Detroit':

'Bragging Rights':

'Colossus':
[lightbox]2023-06-12/Seedfork/98ae24[/lightbox
'Crazy Ivan':

'Wyatt Earp':

'Wish Fulfillment':

'Feliz Navidad':

'Filled With Joy':

'South Sea Enchantment':

'Super Purple':

We have had about three weeks of drought, but these plants in the photos I think are everyone in the bog, and it has not been dry there. Other beds that have been dryer are showing the same symptoms.
Yes we did have some extreme cold for us, and some late freezes. However I think all the plants in these photos actually put out beautiful blooms before the past two weeks. Red Velvet Elvis put out it's best bloom ever just a few days ago and now I don't even recognize it.
So the only other thing I can think of that may be the culprit is my spraying, but as far as I know I have not changed anything. Still, I do need to double check and make sure nothing is different because I did actually swap out some bottles with some easier to hold bottles with snap top lids recently (actually only one the others were changed much earlier). So the only thing that could have been mixed up would be my spreader sticker for my Abamectin, they do look just alike and that was one of the bottles I swapped out. I will double check that. If the new bottle is slicky and sticky then it is my surfactant, and that is what it should be.

I have a similar thing going on, especially in one bed, but mine is even worse. Flowers very small, thin and misshapened. They look like the plant was hit by roundup. I do use roundup occasionally, but carefully and just areas where I have a particularly difficult weed problem. I don't remember using it in that bed. So far blooms don't seem to be improving. I will be watching, hope you get an answer

Lorieg,
Thanks for the reply, I have been using roundup recently, but I have never had this reaction from it before. I also am careful when using it, and as often as I have used it just don't feel it was roundup that is the problem. Hope you find an answer to your problem also.
I was also wondering if it is possible for plants to use up their energy by growing and blooming and multiplying, and be worn down to the point they don't produce
normal blooms? I have not experienced it before except to a much, much, less degree.

Odd, I seem to be logged in as LorieG, I don't remember ever having that name on here before. Guess I should see what happened. Electronics seem be have it in for me lately.
And now I am back. Very interesting 🤔

It's rather odd, as well as having "cupped" petals, in some cases the stamens don't look quite normal. I see some leaf tips in one of the picture that look rather brown and flaccid. Are the leaves in general normal on the affected plants?

Are you using the same spreader-sticker as usual?

Well, now that you mention it, I do have more yellow leaves in the garden than at any other time this year. I attributed that to the age of the leaves and the drought, but I have not noticed any distortion of the leaves.
Yes, I went and checked to make sure the spreader sticker was in the correct bottle and it is the same as I have used for the past two years.

What about your morning temperatures? If you've had cool mornings lately as we have, blooms can have trouble opening properly. Some blooms have that weird look here when it's cool.

Have you had periods of unusual weather in the last few months, possibly overcast skies, lower than normal temperatures? Was winter normal?

admmad
Not a normal winter at all, a very unusual winter in fact. The teens were unusual, the two late freezes were very destructive of buds. I cut hundreds of scapes because the buds were all damaged and the blooms were just puffs.
But early may did have some cooler than normal weather but after that things warmed up and have been pretty normal.
Many of the plants putting out these pathetic blooms just a week or so ago put out some of the most beautiful blooms ever.
Other than the three past weeks of no rain (which is not that unusual unfortunately) I guess the weather would be as close to normal as normal weather gets.

Weather "normal" is ever changing, it would seem - without getting into climate change considerations, we have all been experiencing weather doing its normal, random thing.

When were they last treated with anything? Could there have been a calibration or measuring error or an incompatible tank mix?

Depending on how long the cool weather period was in early May and how cool it was, then that could explain flower colour problems. The normal flowers could have been developing before the cool period and completed their flower pigment development before the cool period. Those flowers would open later and be the early normal flowers. Flowers developing their pigments during the cool pigment would have abnormal colours and would open later after the cool period had ended. That could be now.
Much of the development of flower characteristics happens months and weeks before the flower opens. One year I bought specific daylily cultivars from garden centres to check on misnamed plants. The daylilies I bought had been developing their scapes and flower buds during part of the winter. The characteristics of sunlight during winter are considerably different from those during late spring and summer. The flower colours of the daylilies I purchased were nothing like their registered namesakes and I thought they had been misnamed or worse. That is, until several weeks later when the new flowers opening were the same as their registered namesakes. The environment/light/weather during the time when the flowers had been developing on the early scape had dramatically affected the colours of the flowers that opened many weeks or months later.

I'm having your symptom, but I'm pretty sure mine is drought related. We've had less than two inches of rain going back to April 21 (52 days), and we've only had 0.24 inches going back 30 days to May 13. Generally, it's been hotter than normal with unusually low humidity during this stretch.

It shows up in the blooms for me. Not just daylilies. I have these small, purple clematis that are normally 2-3", I just noticed today they were the size of a quarter. And I have an EE bloomer that started blooming 20 days ago. When it started blooming, it was opening fully and normally. Now, the blooms are smaller and opening like a trumpet-shaped bloom. Not to mention, grass is brown and crispy, something that used to happen in late-July or August.

Sounds like what you described, but I can't imagine it's the same thing for your plants down in the bog.

Sooby,
April 3rd was the last time they were sprayed, same tank mix I have been using. I use a four gal. battery operated sprayer, but it takes many refills to get all the plants sprayed. So I see no way it could be an incompatible tank mix in every tank, which is measured every refill. I use a table spoon for measuring the miracle grow(one tablespoon per gal. and the chlorothalonil (flowable powder) two tablespoons per the three gallons and the sticker spreader one 1+ tablespoon full per three gals. , then a teaspoon to measure the Azoxystrobin;Axoxy 2sc select one teaspoon per three gals. and the Abamectin:Abamectin 0.15 EC Miticide Insecticide, 1 teaspoon per three gals. That is the mixture I have used since buying the new sprayer last year so this will be two seasons to use it. I will brag a bit here and state that in our local exhibition show I won the best small, the best large, the best extra large, and won best in show with my large entry 'Clint Country'. That was on May 27th, then another nice week of blooms and then I started noticing the odd faded out partial opening and poorly shaped blooms. So the timing certainly suggest to me it could be the spray, I am just at a lost to know why or what was different. I keep it all in my shed and in a plastic tub all together so it does not get mixed in with other chemicals..I learned that lesson the hard way. I once sprayed all my daylilies with Spectracide lawn weedkiller, but that seemed to affect the foliage more than anything.
I will not spray when the three week spray period rolls around this time, just to test and see if it makes any difference.
Edited to add: I use a four gal. sprayer, but only mix three gals in it each time, four gals. is too heavy on my sloped property.

Tim
Thanks so much for your post. I felt sure it was the dry conditions when I first noticed the problem in the upper beds, but then when it stated to show down in the bog it just baffled me.

Not sure what Larry is experiencing is what you have, Tim - many of our blooms here are smaller - I have particularly noticed it on Stella D' Oro. It has been very dry here since April, which was very cool and rainy. Much of the winter, through March, it had been warm and dry. The only serious cold snap we had was a couple days over Christmas, and we had almost no snow.

Larry, just out of curiousity... Is it possible that because the bog daylilies have so much moisture available near the surface that the roots do not grow downwards as much as daylilies elsewhere? If it's been pretty dry, is there a chance that the bog is drier at the surface than "normal"?

I've never grown in a bog- no clue how the plants might respond at the rootzone. What's your experience with root growth? Is there a noticeable difference?

This is starting to scare me. We had crazy weather this winter/early spring. And except for a couple of very heavy rainstorms it's been really dry. So far the blooms have been good but I'm afraid of what the next set of flowers to bloom will look like. The flowers in the front have been getting some water but most in the back haven't had any. I'll see if the flowers are different between the two.

I've also had a ton of aphids. The ladybugs are breeding but they seem slower to reproduce. Probably due to the drought. I'm afraid the aphids are damaging the buds in the backyard.

Hello Larry, Your climate zone is the same as mine 8b and the weather here was just as unusual here as you describe. In fact, today the high temperature was about 85 degrees which is probably 8 to 10 degrees lower than what I would expect for June 12. We had early December temperatures of 11 degrees overnight during an unusually cold week where high temperatures stayed in the 30's. Then we had a very wet winter and spring except for about 2 weeks in late April or early May when it was just beautiful (mid-70's to low 80's) then another cold dip into the high 20's and mid-30 before it went back to very pleasant spring weather again. However the real summer temperature or staggering daily humidity has never arrived. The temperatures for this week are predicted to be in the mid 80's except for highs of 86 on Thursday, 90 on Friday, 89 on Saturday and 88 on Sunday then returning to the mid-80's for next week. I have lived in Georgia for 43 years now and I have never experienced a summer like this before. It is typically 90-95 by late May, and ramping up slowly in June, July and August where 95-100+ is typical.
All of this is to say my daylilies are performing very differently this year. I lost several to the very cold temperatures of last December and several more that lost all foliage at that time but came back with new growth. Most of those were evergreens, but lost some some northern semi-evergreens too, for example Soli Deo Gloria which was hybridized in Minnesota. Once the flowering season began here in second week of May there were any number of them that had trouble opening and several distorted/malformed blooms, but all colors were much deeper and more vibrant than I had ever seen before. I have two micro-climates in my garden. One is about 2 weeks ahead of the other due to a tighter enclosure that minimizes wind and maximizes temperature. I've seen the same trends in both areas, malformed blooms and strong colors from the first blooms. Now that temperatures have stabilized for 4-6 weeks (although without our usual high temps!) some of what I would typically call "normal" colors and beginning to return. However, there are still many that open poorly but never did in the past and still some malformed blooms. Here is an example of the color change:







This is what I expected to see based on my flowers bleaching out in our typical heat, but to a somewhat lesser degree. I thought that it might show stages going from the strong red to the rose color shown in the later picture as this looks like what has bloomed in my yard for over 5 years. Color differences were seen in all shades of red and purple and in some near-black flowers. I think the second picture is on the first rebloom scape, so maybe that's what will happen in other rebloom scapes too. I have seen no lighter shades as your photos showed.
I'm not sure that this gives you any thoughts concerning your flower, but a few friends in my area have seen things similar to what I have seen regarding the influence of early and colder winter temperatures and larger variations leading up to bloom time on bloom form and daylily color.
Larry W

admmad,
What you describe is pretty much what I think has taken place. Some of the worst flowers followed by some of the best flowers followed by some of the worst flowers.
I do hope it is just weather related, I was thinking it was, but the delay in the development of the systems still has me wondering, it is just so strange.
LarryW,
Thanks for your post, being your in my zone it helps to know that strange flowering is taken place throughout the region. The extreme change in bloom color brightness in my garden is just unprecedented. I am starting to get a lot of rebloom scapes, it will be interesting to see how the blooms end up looking on those scapes.