I teach 3rd grade and we have new science objectives this year. One thing I have to teach my kids is how new plants are the same/different as their parent plants and the plant life cycle. I immediately thought of daylilies since they are so beautiful and easy to grow. Is there a website that would list the parentage of registered daylilies? I would also love it if you could post pictures of parents & offspring that you have created. I am also looking at how hard/expensive it would be to grow seeds with my class. Are there inexpensive places to get daylily seeds?

Use our database.

Do you need seeds?

My son teaches fourth grade and follow them to fifth grade.
My daughter-in-law teaches second grade gifted and talented.
I teach high school Spanish, and many classes elsewhere about botany.

Gerry

You might try using H. Francis of Assisi as an example because it has a simple parentage line to follow for a couple of generations. Not seeing the variations in color on FOA that you might be looking for. But the parentage of some daylilies can get complicated. As Gerry said, ATP is a great resource to find pictures of daylilies for your project.

here is a link to our Daylily Database here at ATP.
The Daylilies Database

But, if you are not all that familiar with daylilies, you may not know names of daylilies to look up to get good examples.

I thought I would try to give you the links to a few well known daylily "parents" to get you started. I just asked Dave today to add a thumbnail of the "child" plant to the page that comes up when you click on the "number of child plants" Thanks @dave for adding this feature! This thread is the reason I asked you to do this today!

To get to that, for an example… go to my link of Admiral's Braid below. At the bottom of the second area of information… right above where the photos start it says "Child plants:" then "311 child plants" If you click on the "311 Child plants" you will go to a new page with all the registered child plants of Admiral's braid. You can click on the child plant's name to go to that plant's information page, or go to their parentage off to the right (which are also clickable to take you to those parent's pages etc) .

Hope that makes sense!

Here are some older, but well used parent plants. I'm just pulling these off the top of my head, trying to give you a wide variety of looks and colors.

ADMIRAL'S BRAID is a famous parent.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Admiral's Braid')

DANCE BALLERINA DANCE was very widely used years ago.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Dance Ballerina Dance')

BARBARA MITCHELL, a diploid, had quite a variety of colors registered as offspring.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Barbara Mitchell')

There are enough ED BROWN offspring registered that you may find some that are the same cross by different hybridizers, or even the same hybridizer. Those flowers may look different.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Ed Brown')

FOOLED ME could show the dominance of an eye….
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Fooled Me')

SABINE BAUR is a completely different look.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Sabine Baur')

KINDLY LIGHT is a long petaled spider.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Kindly Light')

TRAHLYTA makes some unusual seedlings.
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Trahlyta')

If there are particular traits you are trying to show to your students, perhaps others here could chime in on daylilies that might have child plants with photos in our database that would show the traits you are trying to show.

If all you want to do is start some seeds for a class, I am sure there would be people who could send you a few - but depending on your conditions it can take a while for them to bloom. Here in Ohio it can take 3-4 years. Texas ? 2 years maybe? Just so you are aware of that.

Also, on the Daylily Database home page, under the link for Generic Daylilies Entry, you will find this page…. there are photos there of seed pods, seedlings all sorts of things.
Daylilies (Hemerocallis)

You might try Bill Maryott's website for what you want. He has developed a template for showing parents and offspring. One time I offered seeds to a HS Biology teacher, who said that they could get seed that grew in 6 weeks, so why wait for 1-2 years? Just yesterday, I thought about building an 8' X 16' seed bed at a local Christian Academy and covering it with a mini hoop house this winter to get surplus DL seeds to bloom maybe next late spring before they leave for summer. I may pursue interest this week.
David the Dreamer

Tabitha,

Love your idea! Do you have anywhere to grow the seedlings or will the students take them home?

I use daylilies to teach my plant unit for 7th graders. I have some materials ( handouts, power points, etc) that you may be able to modify or pull some information from. Here is my lesson plans http://www.amgen.com/pdfs/aast...

You may also want to check out the AHS (American Hemerocallis Society) if you are not familiar with it.

Tree mail me if you are interested, maybe we could have some of my 7th/8th graders send information to help teach your 3rd graders. I may also have seeds to share as I have been lucky that several wonderful people have shared seeds with my class over the years.

Lisa

Thank you for all the great suggestions and information. I have heard that due to our mild winters in Houston that they may bloom in 1-2 years. We moved houses last summer, so I got almost no seeds this year. Thanks Lisa for the lesson plans and everyone for the DL varieties you suggested. Seeds would be great if you have some to share.

Seedlings can definitely look different from the parent. Here are three plants whose seed came for the same seed pod. The pod parent was Little Grapette, but I don't know who the pollen parent was. :-(
FYI, you have to click on the picture to see all three as it is too wide.


This is one of the seedings compared to Little Grapette (the one I am holding)


Another picture of Little Grapette.

Love that comparison, Laura.

Very interesting the differences from the same pod.

Last year was the first time I successfully grew daylily seeds with my class. Thanks Profesora for the seeds! I started each seed in a 3oz cup. 1/2 were paper cups and 1/2 were plastic cups because that is what I had in my classroom. We grew them under grow lights, but my class wasn't very consistent in remembering to water them. My plan was to repot into bigger containers in January, but I stepped on a piece of glass and had unexpected foot surgery. The seedlings got neglected and my Christmas decorations didn't get put up till Easter last year, but many of the seedlings survived. That is one of the reasons I love daylilys. They can take a little neglect and still live. Most seedlings in plastic cups survived. Many of the seedlings in paper cups died. I think the paper cups didn't hold water in the soil as well as the plastic cups. Last summer I planted some seedlings in the ground and repotted the other seedlings. This fall when it wasn't so hot, I planted the rest of the seedlings in the ground. It didn't freeze this winter, so they grew a lot, but not enough to bloom this year. I included a picture of one of the groups of seedlings.

This year I am at a new school that has a beautiful garden behind it. The garden was completely neglected and full of weeds, but has great potential. Hopefully by fall it will be ready to plant, and I would like to dedicate one bed to growing daylilies. I hope to pick up some new plants next weekend from a local DL grower. My daughter and I have enjoyed looking up the offered dayliliy varieties on this website and seeing the parent and child plants. I think that is one of my favorite features about this website. It has been very interesting to see the changes and variety in different generations. We have even found some registered siblings.

I certainly would not count out many of those seedlings still blooming this year. It is very early in the season and if you are giving them plenty of water I would be very surprised if at least a few of them did not bloom this season.

are the seedlings at the other school you were at?

My old school was about to expand the parking lot, so there wasn't really a "safe" place to plant them. I planted them in my yard for now.

Tabitha - Oh good! I am glad you still have them! I think you may get blooms on many of them this year. I've had some seedlings that had a smaller fan and got blooms last year. Some had blooms almost as tall as the actual daylily foliage. Looked pretty funny!