Hmm, daylily "Q" terms...what about Quantity. As gardeners we need to balance the amount of planting space we have, our ability to care for them, the $ we can spend... with our desire to own them all.

The only daylily I grow that begins with "Q" is Quicksilver Girl...

How about "Quality". You know, the ones that does exceptionally well in "YOUR" garden. Char don't feel bad, I only have two "Q's".
Quartz Rainbow


Quiet My Heart

Quest. The quest for hybridizing a totally new kind of daylily is fun and exciting, as mentioned in Bob Watsons thread.

The thread "Diploids, Triploids, Tetraploids, and now Hexaploids" in Daylilies forum

I was wondering what people were going to pull out of the hat for Q!

The only Q daylily I ever had was 'Quick Results' (no longer in this garden).



My term for today, is Question.

If you see something odd in your garden, you should question it.

"Why does that daylily produce flowers with petaloids now and then?" (Maybe there are some double genes lurking there! Maybe you should try crossing it to a double, or to a single daylily known to throw doubles.) In general, if you find yourself questioning “Why does that daylily occasionally throw XYZ blooms? “, then maybe there are some XYZ genes hidden there, and you should go see if you can magnify that trait.

If you have a daylily that you like, but whose flowers won’t open well for you, then maybe you should question what you could cross it with, so that maybe the offspring’s flowers do open well. (Maybe a UF? A spider? Something round but recurved?)

Questioning isn’t just for the hybridizers and backyard pollen dabbers, though.

"Why are so many of the daylilies that I buy from Hybridizer X rusty?" (Maybe you should do an ancestry search on the daylilies that you buy (from anyone) - before you buy. If there are rusty plants in the background, and no notably resistant ones, and the plant in question does not have a reputation (or even hybridizer hype) for resistance, then I would suspect the plant to be rusty.)

In that vein, a more general question which has been asked before, but which bears repeating, is this:
“Daylily rust has been present in this country since 2000. What are daylily hybridizers doing to incorporate (and concentrate) rust resistance genes into their cultivars?”

There are rust resistant diploids. There are rust resistant tetraploids. Why aren’t these being used more, and the rust susceptible cultivars (and seedlings) less, in producing new introductions? (Yes, I know that Petit has made some effort in this direction, as have some others. What about the rest of you? The primary responsibility of a plant breeder is to produce healthy, disease resistant plants - or at least, it should be.)

(Gee... where's the soapbox icon when you need one?)

Quilled - I don't have any with quilled petals but I know someone will

Really struggling for a "Q" word, so it will be Quarantine, with rust being a big problem now with daylilies, it might become necessary to keep new purchases in quarantine until it can be determined if they have rust.

Quiet beauty of a daylily that is a soft color.