Background history:

'Monica Marie' is a evergreen introduced in 1982 by Gates-L..

It has earned the following AHS awards:
Award of Merit: 1991
Honorable Mention: 1986

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

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 'Monica Marie')

I first got Monica Marie in the summer of 2021 as a replacement for Joan Senior, which had been subject to severe rust problems and which I had been forced to get rid of as a result. Monica Marie had a rust resistance score of 1.0. I bought two DFs from Sterrett Gardens.

Both plants bloomed and one rebloomed the next season. I was pleased with the blooms, very ruffled and pretty although not quite as white as Joan Senior had been. One of the plants came down with crown rot; I was able to save some of it and planted it next to the other one to make a nice clump. As of spring 2023, I had seven fans. Monica Marie bloomed and rebloomed in 2023, but I don't have notes on the length of the bloom period, number of blooms, or branching. She has certainly achieved registered height of 24", maybe a little more. She has doubled for me, which you can see in one of the pics below.

Monica Marie is supposed to be an evergreen, but not here.

She is a pretty plant and has been very rust-resistant in my garden, so she can stay.

Curious, I saw Monica Marie has 107 registered children. Monica Marie is registered as a tetraploid [confirmed on the AHS database] but has been crossed to many diploids [many by Apps] with diploid kids. There are a couple of registered Stamille crosses and others that show specifically "Tet Monica Marie" as a parent. Makes one wonder for sure.

I noticed that, too, but forgot to mention it. I am reasonably sure MM is a diploid. I have Full Moon Rising (diploid) as well, a child plant of Joan Senior, a diploid, and Monica Marie. I think the tetraploid registry is a mistake. I notice that MM's parents aren't listed. Maybe the hybridizer simply was mistaken.

Comment posted on the cultivar page.

That comment about "Tet Monica Marie" as a parent makes me think that it was a Tet conversion that did not fully become a Tet, and that there was maybe a diploid version originally?

Don't they revert sometimes?

The history is complicated.

There were many daylilies treated with colchicine and then assumed to have been converted. The treatments may have been to seeds or seedlings or plants but the conclusion that the planst had been converted was often based only on apparent differences between flower sizes, leaf thicknesses, etc. Those differences are/were not reliable enough. The assumed ploidies were not based on chromosome counts or other reliable methods.

Unfortunately, many supposedly converted plants were registered as tetraploids that were not converted and were diploids. One hybridizer in particular had this problem publicly. That was Gates.

It turned out that many of his registered tetraploids were diploids. That seemed to be the case for his tetraploids that were not red flowered. Those of his registered tetraploids that were red flowered were actually tetraploid.

The story is that there was a kerfuffle about the ploidy of his registrations and he hired someone to test them scientifically. However, I do not think that the registration data was ever corrected.

In any case, a good starting assumption is that tetraploid red-flowered Gates registrations are probably actually tetraploid while tetraploid non-red Gates registrations are probably diploid.

'Monica Marie' is a diploid.
Some years later hybridizers did produce a tetraploid conversion of the diploid so daylilies registered as tetraploid that have parentage stating "tet Monica Marie" are tetraploid.

A small bit of the story about Gates tetraploids that are diploids was mentioned on page 106 of the book, Daylilies - a fifty year affair.

I don't know if anything was written about it in the Daylily Journal.

for this historical background!

Yes, thanks, Maurice! Very interesting!

Monica Marie was my inspiration for my 30 year breeding program. I wanted white flowers like it on a northern rebloomer like Stella De Oro. I finally achieved that with North Meets South (Huben 2020).

Monica Marie grew slowly but well in Z6 and Z5, with gorgeous emerging dormant foliage in MA and NH. I've still got it!

@Char
Edit: Working now with the full info:
Don't know why it came up like this before.
Is this just a glitch in the download?
I just looked up North Meets South in the garden.org data base and only got this:
North Meets South (Huben 2020)
I looked it up on the AHS site:
North Meets South (Huben, 2020)
height 26 inches (66 cm), bloom 4 inches (10 cm), season EM, Rebloom, Dormant, Diploid, 17 buds, 4 branches, Near white, ruffled, bagel shape, opens well in cool temperatures, northern rebloomer.. (Accentuate the Green × Evelyn Gates)

@Seedfork
I'm not sure what you're asking Larry. When I pull up North Meets South in our database I get the full reg info.
If your question is how North Meets South relates to Monica Marie...taking Mike's comment and tracing back the parentage you can see the influence Monica Marie had on his hybridizing, as he briefly explained.