There is a company in Canada that will tissue culture your daylily cultivars for you, to sell, provided you are the original hybridizer. You ship them a starter fan and a year later they ship you back a hundred or more small starter plants cloned from the original.
It seemed reasonably priced as-well, from what I remember (a few thousand bucks).
It would actually be fun to then compare different cloned plants under different conditions to truly test what conditions make daylilies thrive. We always speculate on what fertilizers are best etc, but using clones someone can actually get a true answer.
Yes, I have heard that daylilies may not bloom the same when cloned (probably due to changes in genomic gene expression). However, given that the DNA is identical to the parent, the clones should be able to be used for hybridizing identically as for the original (as the genomic landscape should be wiped clean when making pollen). So if you care only about hybridization rather than looking at a pretty face then using a clone should be of no consequence.

Maybe so, Orion, but you don't need 1,000 of a cultivar to use it as a parent. A flower's worth of pollen goes a long way. And I wouldn't sell or trade a clone to anyone I like, even if the bloom looked the same. It seems the only reason to do that is make money selling clones (granted, maybe to landscapers who don't care that much as long as the color is close).

I would be fine with buying a clone of a hard-to-get daylily as long as it was priced appropriately (maybe 25% of original value). There are ones that are even sold en-mass that I cannot get my hands on (e.g. Malja/Golden Zebra) which I would be very happy to get a clone of. Anything is better than nothing.
For example, when I was hunting for Cliffjumper I initially gave up in frustration and bought seeds from it instead, hoping they would look like it. I would have jumped at the chance back then to get a clone, as that would probably have looked closer than a random cross with another daylily I cared nothing about.

I will also note the unfortunate experience of buying daylilies from a company which, I am sure, does tissue culture to produce massive quantities for sale ... and that company would be BRECK's. I placed an order with them (in 2016) for ... trying to remember the precise number... roughly 10-12 daylilies, along with some other plants.

When the order arrived, they were the tiniest daylilies I have ever seen (outside of growing my own from seeds) ... literally, nothing was taller than about 3 inches, and several were so little I could barely call them anything.

One died within a week of arrival... among the survivors, nothing bloomed for at least 2 or 3 years, and when they finally did bloom... not what I ordered... not what I ordered... not what I ordered.

No 'Get Jiggy' ... no 'Here Lies Butch' ... no 'First Knight' .. no 'French Lingerie' ... and so on.

ONE daylily actually appears to be what I paid for. Nothing else bloomed even close to what it was 'supposed' to be. (Never again.)

While they may 'guarantee' their plants for the first year, they do not guarantee for plants you have to wait years for to bloom. So, save your money and stick to daylily nurseries and gardeners who produce and sell what you pay for. Oh, and this year...?

I am buying 'Get Jiggy' ... again ... this time, from Keast Daylily Gardens. I've already waited about six years to have it blooming in my gardens.

Now THAT's clever! Guarantee your plant for a year, but only because they sell you a plant that won't bloom for two years. I'm sorry about your experience, Dianne.

One can also check with Terra Nova Nursery, Dan Hines has a setup for Tissue culture and they are in Oregon. If you get a chance to visit, make an appointment they love
to show off their work. I went in 2003 and learned a lot from the trip. Give me a tissue culture plant any day!!

Do you buy plants other than daylilies from garden centres or big box stores or supermarkets or... then you probably have bought many tissue cultured (micropropagated) (tc) plants.
Strawberry plants are tissue cultured.
Seed potatoes are tissue cultured.
Orchids are tissue cultured.
Hosta are tissue cultured
Azalea, Dogwood, Boxwood, Heather, Ferns, Smokebush, Wintergreen, Ornamental Grasses, Hibiscus, Hydrangea, Juniper, Honeysuckle, Magnolia, Bamboo, Ninebark, Spruce, Cinquefoil, Flowering Currant, Spirea, Cedar, Blueberry, Yucca.
Those are only a few of the different plants that are offered to the garden centres that are tissue cultured by just one company.
From another company
Agapanthus, Agave, Aloe, Banana, Blueberry, Carex, Cordyline, Draceana, Echeveria, Euphorbia, Ginger, Hazelnut, Heuchera, Hosta, Iris, Juncus, Kalanchoe, Kniphofia, Liriope, Mandevilla, Philodendron, Pennisetum, Phormium, Plumeria, Raspberry, Senecio, Walnut
Each company tends to have different species that they tissue culture and there are many different tc companies.

Tissue culture per se may not be a bad thing, but when you end up with a plant like the one in Tim's (Lyshack) post that he purchased as Purple de Oro, it certainly can be disappointing.
https://garden.org/thread/view...

I got First Knight from Oakes many years ago. It was not listed in the catalog and I had to ask for it.

Sorry to say that I tossed my clump after about three years....

Deryll said: I got First Knight from Oakes many years ago. It was not listed in the catalog and I had to ask for it.

Sorry to say that I tossed my clump after about three years....

does Oakes sell tissue cultured daylilies nowadays?

I believe Deryll said that to let Dianne know that he used to have one she wanted but does not now have it. Deryll, you can clarify. Did you mean to suggest Oakes was selling tissue-cultured daylilies?

I would be astonished if they were. The plants I've gotten from them have always been large (clump-size) and very healthy. The flowers always look like what I was expecting. Oakes does have some issues (overcharging is one of them), but I can't believe their plants are tissue-cultured.

DeweyRooter said: I believe Deryll said that to let Dianne know that he used to have one she wanted but does not now have it. Deryll, you can clarify. Did you mean to suggest Oakes was selling tissue-cultured daylilies?

I would be astonished if they were. The plants I've gotten from them have always been large (clump-size) and very healthy. The flowers always look like what I was expecting. They do have some issues, but I can't believe their plants are tissue-cultured.

And thank you @Deryll - I will check with Oakes. They have always sent me superb daylilies. Really, I don't mind paying top $ for a superior plant! It's worth it.

But I paid top $ for the daylilies I ordered from BRECKs, which is why I will never buy from them again.

'Disappointment' does not come close to how I feel about that last order... (I'm still on their mailing list, and everything from them goes into the trash unopened.)

I appreciate the comments, too, from Maurice. I am sure there are some very noteworthy plants ... including hostas... which result from TC. If it did not work / was not successful, this conversation would not be taking place. But perhaps daylilies are not among the better plants for that particular process.

Well, to be fair to tissue-culture, nobody on this thread has presented any actual evidence that their sub-par daylilies were tissue cultured ones. Just assumption, which is not evidence.
For all we know, self-seeded fans may have grown from parent plants and been mistaken for, and sold as, the parent.

There is a difference from cloning and tissue cultures, but some folks think they are
the same.

I've always had good luck with oakes plants and I'll never believe they are tissue cultured unless I seen it with my own eyes. And as was pointed out, not really any hard evidence that tc is bad anyway, or that it affects all dl bad even if it does for some.

As a rule, I don't log on here very often, but it is a cool Sunday and I just popped in.

I always got small clumps when I ordered from Oakes, so I don't believe they use tissue culture. I have seen photos of their growing fields, and it looks like it covers several acres.

As for tissue culture itself, that is one area I would dearly love to explore- not just for daylilies. It looks to be an amazing field, and I really admire those people.... I just can't imagine growing a plant from a cell scraped from a leaf. Incredible!

Just a thought... I have gotten plants from Gilbert Wild that were tissue cultured, and they seemed to perform quite well. I generally ordered three of each knowing they were small, and never saw any variation in the plants that I ordered. As with my own seedlings, they generally bloomed the following year. Not having a science background, I don't know the difference between "cloning" and tissue cultured, so I could have my terms confused. I actually thought they were the same thing! And before anyone says anything, the Hostas from Gilbert Wild did take longer than a year to mature....

LOL... I have a good many sub-par daylilies that I have bought and later discarded that were not from tissue culture, so I can't contribute their origins for that issue. Live and learn I guess, but it sure doesn't keep me from buying new plants every year!

In the context we are talking there is not really much of a difference between cloned and tissue cultured. Although, technically ever new fan from almost any daylily (ignoring reversion of tet conversions for now) is a 'clone' of the original. Just a natural clone is all.
Versus tissue culturing, which generated the clone in a lab instead, from a much smaller source of stem cells exposed to growth factors and specific growth conditions.

Clone, from the AHS Daylily Dictionary:

https://daylilies.org/daylily-...

I grow some daylilies produced by tissue culture from two different sources here in Europe - and the experience with the plants is over all quite good. A friend of mine is working in this field - he told me that it all depends on quality control during the whole production process. The plants can be created by tissue culture but then you have to grow them in the field for at least one season to check if the flower quality is like it should be - there are always some plants to cull, even if the process is carefully done.
The remaining ones can be sold and will satisfy the customers - not only because of their quality but also because of their quite reasonable prices.
My own experience is that some of this plants (I have about twenty here) do grow slower than expected for the first years - finally they all made it up to now.

I could write -
tissue culture is tissue culture is tissue culture...
but it is not!
Not all tissue culture (a better term is micropropagation) is the same. There are different ways of micropropagating plants.
It is possible to take a piece of a leaf and get it to grow into a whole new plant with roots, crown and leaves, etc.
To do that one gives the piece of leaf conditions that make it grow into what is called a callus. The callus is not a piece of leaf any more. Then by changing the conditions one can make the callus produce roots, and crown and so on - a new plant. When micropropagation is done through callus there can be problems. The callus must not be used for a long time to produce new plants because it can accumulate problems. The plants that are produced by using callus should be field grown to flowering to make certain that they are true-to-type or true-to-name especially if the callus tissue has been used for a lengthy time.
Micropropagating plants does not require callus. It can be done in ways that are much like cutting a daylily crown into four pieces and getting four or more new (and smaller daylilies) from one crown. When a daylily crown is cut into pieces the main growing point is destroyed. When it is destroyed other growing points can take its place and so axillary buds sprout into new fans from each piece (when all goes well). Micropropagation can use specific growing conditions to get the axillary buds to sprout from a piece of daylily crown. No callus is involved.

Are daylilies difficult to micropropagate without problems - I don't think so - not even when callus is involved.

A USDA researcher specifically wanted to produce daylily variants (somaclonal) through micropropagation and modified the procedures to try to deliberately increase the numbers of variants.

Let me quote from the Daylily Journal pg 280 Volume 45 Number 3 1990, Dr. R. J. Griesbach.

"The occurrence of somaclonal variants in Hemerocallis is practically non-existent. Among the more than 200 micropropagated plants and 27,000 flowers of 'Autumn Blaze', not a single variant was found. In commercial tissue culture propagation, variants have never been found. Because of this genetic stability micropropagated plants are not a satisfactory source of variation.

We developed a tissue culture technique for inducing somaclonal variation. Of 500 tissue cultured plants and 2500 flowers of 'Eenie Weenie', two variants were found. ...[one] variant reverted to the normal plant habit. Another variant produced a dwarf plant habit with shorter inflorescences and smaller male-sterile flowers."

The only variant in 500 daylily plants that were micropropagated using a method specifically meant to produce high numbers of variants was shorter (2/3 the height), had a narrower leaf (1/2 the width), was pollen-sterile, had a much smaller flower (less than 2/3 the diameter) and had fewer buds. There was no mention that the variant had a different flower colour. The variant daylily was registered as 'Yellow Tinkerbell.'

That report was based on micropropagation techniques for daylilies from the 1970s to 1989. Micropropagation methods in general have advanced considerably since then.