Larry - I do look for reblooms, too. But often the reblooms aren't quite as impressive as the initial blooms. Mine are often shorter scapes and fewer buds. I do agree with what you said.

Larry, I have had very little rebloom, I do have Going Bananas with noticeable shorter scapes reblooming and surprisingly two rebloom scapes on Oceans Eleven that appear about the same. I have noticed looking at the hybridizers descriptions, that they often state fewer buds on rebloom, and I have also seen it stated, shorter scapes. Emmerich is good for including this info. If they on average perform different, then I would think that you would want to keep the stats separate. Since I know that I am very unlikely to get rebloom on most plants, I would really just be interested in the averages for the initial scapes.

Gale

I guess my question is do hybridizers take the average for the season, or just the first scapes? Just seems to me the average would have to include all the scapes, but then again, maybe that is why so many people say they never average getting the bud count the hybridizers show.
Of course in reverse, if the hybridizer counts all the buds on all the scapes, and you only count the first best ones, you should get a higher number than the hybridizer.
So should we count the first scapes only, or all the scapes ?

If you were at a nursery, how would you know if the blooms are the first blooms or reblooms?

I would not know, that is why I don't see how that could work. I will only report what I see in my garden. I do think we should find out how the bud count is done when registering a plant an conform to that method, which ever it is.

I agree.

Anyone out there who registers plants, feel free to jump in here. We need some help. Is there a standard procedure to follow when doing a bud count? I looked on the AHS site, but it was not very clear to me where I was reading, it did not go into much detail. Is there a pre set method, or does it just come down to walk out in the garden one day and take a count?
http://www.daylilies.org/ahs_d...

I can't imagine that rebloom scapes would be counted. Initial scapes only, and then take the average.

DogsNDaylilies,
Seems we overlooked your request for fragrance on the form, I probably wouldn't be able to smell it unless it was pretty strong. But if I could smell it then I could report with certainty that it was fragrant.

Ok, read some more and just from the implications of the paragraph below bud count, where it talks about bloom season, it defines bloom season as not including re-bloom. So I think that might indicate that just the initial scapes be counted when doing a bud count, even though it does not directly say that.So if no one replies with a different answer, that will make it a heck of a lot easier, just to do the initial scape bud counts and take the average from them.
http://www.daylilies.org/AHSre...

What I seem to recall some people doing is leave all the dead scapes on to do the bud count. When flowering is finished, or maybe even later, they then count bud scars and scapes and take the average.

There was a study done some time ago that also pertains to this discussion. It is discussed in the AHS 2002 Handbook (a very useful book). In shade they noted flower bud length and opening was not affected by shade but in shade more buds blasted, number of flowers per scape was lower on average, plants started flowering later (by 7 to 12 days), the period of flowering was shorter, fewer new fans, plus a few other things that aren't really relevant to this discussion ("Shading" on pages 130 to 131 for anyone who has the book).

To be honest, as a non-hybridizer I pay zero attention to bud count. I'm with Julie on the following:

floota said:Also with bud count,when instructing judges, I refer to bud placement rather than bud count!!! What is the point of having a high bud count if the cultivar is top branched or if the buds are so crowded that half of the blooms can't open properly? Also, some hybridizers will register cultivars with minimal bud count .(12-13) if the cultivar has a high proportion of scapes per fan.

I've seen daylilies with so many buds that the new ones couldn't open and the soggy remains of the old ones were draped all over them, not pretty. Also, as is currently being discussed on another forum, I'd rather have a daylily that bloomed for a longer period of time and maybe had more scapes with well-placed flowers, than a smaller number of scapes stuffed with flowers that flowered for a shorter period. Perhaps number of flowers to number of fans rather than scapes would be more useful?

Remember also that the home gardener and landscaper isn't going to be going around dead-heading every day or even at all. So IMHO hybridizers should not dead-head either.

Coincidentally, I was flipping through some old Daylily Journals the other day looking for something else and came across an article by Don Spencer in the Fall 1992 issue entitled "The Self-Grooming Daylily". In the article he criticizes 'Pardon Me', for example, because it is "....particularly demanding of good grooming, partly because it is such a good bloomer but more importantly because the dead flowers take such a long time to drop off". He mentioned Darrel Apps saying at a meeting that hybridizers should pay more attention to producing daylilies that are "better self groomers".

Mr. Spencer noted that some daylilies fold up their dead flowers neatly, keep their colour and fall off within a day or two. (I was removing old flowers the other day to take a photograph and on that particular cultivar it was hard to tell the difference between yesterday's finished bloom and today's that was about to open). He also noted that "With most cultivars, too many withered blooms hang onto the scapes for as many as four to five days before they finally fall off", and then adds "But slaves of their garden who deadhead daily would not be aware of that".

I have witnessed all of those examples in my own garden and hybridizing program. Some of mine get really soggy and DO take 4-5 to fall off. In the meantime, they are draped across a new bud trying to open up and can't. I hate that!!! So here I go around deadheading. Not a trait I would want to pass on to children seedlings.

When there were around seven questions in my example form the consensus was that was too much. Even though it would take seconds to just click on one of the answer choices it was thought it still would take too long or be perceived to take too long. Therefore I don't think we should add the soil type question (sand, loam, clay) or the fragrance question, or any other questions. Would certainly be nice info to have but prioritizing I would put them down.

As Sue says, bloom count in and of itself does not tell us everything we'd want to know about buds. However, bud counts do give a fairly good indication of the "firepower" of the plant and bloom period. I think it is worthy of being counted. Comment section could be a place to describe bud spacing "self grooming" characteristics.

If we wanted to "enable" people who have the time and desire to be thorough, maybe we could add to the form several optional comments areas, each labeled to indicate what the comments are about: general, bud spacing, self grooming, etc. For that matter we could add several questions to the bottom of the form in an "optional" section, for less critical but nice things to know...

Seedfork said:DogsNDaylilies ,GDJCB
I think maybe it could also be zone related, down here nearly all the daylilies rebloom.

<insert jealous smiley face icon here>

Dennis - I think instead of omitting questions, let's allow folks to answer however many questions they want to. Some info is better than none. Maybe a note could be added somewhere that "buyers" want to know additional information to help them make successful selection purchases.

@Sooby - Sue, you bring up some GREAT points about creating self-grooming daylilies. Grooming is important. I'm not sure it should be on the particular form we're discussing about branching and budding, but it is definitely something that would be a handy thing to encourage people to comment on.

@Dennis616 - Dennis, I think the fragrance question should be a separate thing from the bud/branching/foliage information, but thank you for addressing my suggestion. I agree that the budding/branching form needs to be kept simpler. To address your comment regarding soil...I wasn't thinking that the "sandy, clay, etc..." would be a separate question, I was thinking it might replace the question for "poor soil, average soil...". I wouldn't know how to answer about whether my soil was 'poor', 'average', or 'excellent', personally. I simply know that most of my daylilies are planted in areas with clay-like soil mixed with a compost/top soil mix. Is that poor, average, or excellent? I don't know. That's why I thought it might be easier to address the composition of the soil (which is more objective) than commenting on whether it is poor or not (which is more subjective).


@dave - is there a way for the system to toggle displaying only certain information? (Actually, since I know there is a way, the better question is: is it easy enough to do that you would be willing to do it?) If so, I pose the following suggestion...

***
To combine some of the ideas in this thread, here's a thought:
What if we use Dennis' form (which is still being discussed/modified) and, as suggested before, the form automatically defaults to the user's location. From that, the data is stored and each user can toggle a checkbox for "Show Results From My Zone [or Location] Only". This would be in a settings somewhere so that they don't have to click on it every time they look up an individual flower. If it's checked, the user only sees bud/branch/foliage results from their area (whether it's zone-based or location-based...TBD). Above the results section, it would need to have something that says in bold or in red "Showing Results Near User Location Only" (or similar) so that the user remembers they need to uncheck the box if they change their mind about what results they want to see. There could also be other options for toggling, such as "only show me results for 'partial shade' or 'clay soil'.
***


To all: What do you think of the above idea?

If you guys are intrigued, but aren't exactly sure what I'm suggesting, I will create a quick mock-up of what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, I have hybridizing to do, so I can't do it right now or I would.

That might work, that would only work if a lot of people submitted these reports. I do agree though that something like that would be useful, but I think that we should stick to just the survey for now, and then if it a a huge success then we could think about other ways of using it in the database.


For daylilies that the initial scapes are different that the rebloom scape we could just say in the comment for the survey that it was a rebloom scape or a initial scape. This way people could see the difference between the rebloom and initial scape. Even if nobody submitted a report for their area about the daylily, they could still see that the rebloom scape is different that the initial scape for somebody else in a different state, but they could know that it would probably show the same difference in the scapes for them.

A question. Does weather affect dying blooms? It seems likely that low vs high humidity would. Other factors like wind and sun exposure might factor in as well. Lots of moisture or dry conditions might cause the bud/blooms themselves to have higher/lower water retention which might also affect it. It seemed to me that on days with a bit of drizzle early, the bloom carcasses were more slimy than on sunny dry days. But that was just an impression and all this is just speculation.

That all seems to be true to me too, but we are not going to have that in our report are we?

DogsNDaylilies said:@Sooby - Sue, you bring up some GREAT points about creating self-grooming daylilies. Grooming is important. I'm not sure it should be on the particular form we're discussing about branching and budding, but it is definitely something that would be a handy thing to encourage people to comment on.

Agreed I wasn't suggesting that should go on this form, I mentioned it as a related factor because the bud count and branching can affect the ugliness of a scape by "capturing" spent blooms if they're of the fat and soggy kind. So if you're going with a high bud count then you'd also (hopefully) want to consider what the blooms do when they're done and whether they interfere with each other when open. The size of the actual blooms is also a factor in bud count and branching. You could get away with more smaller blooms than larger.