A simple yet clear guide to cultivate daylilies. I'd jump right into it if I were to have the space for it, but alas.

One 'small problem' though. Since there are so many registered cultivars, in god's name how do you even begin to pick a name that isn't already taken?
Second, can seedlings produce exactly the same cultivar as one that is a few generations back? I'll try to explain:

P1: Plain red daylilie with no ruffles x Plain white daylilie with ruffles

F1: assorted seedlings with different flowers.

P2: cross between two flowers of the F1 generation

F2: again assorted seedlings with different flowers, yet one has flowers exactly as one of the P1 parent plants (plain red or ruffled white) --> does THIS seedling automaticly adopt the cultivar name of the parent plant it resembles or not?

Because it must be really difficult to identify a new cultivar because you'd have to read through all those thousands of cultivar descriptions to identify that a combination of those features doesn't already exist in your new flowers.

Lee-Roy - Each seedling - regardless of how it looks - is unique. It is NOT an exact duplicate to any other daylily, just a child of the registered parent plant. To get a duplicate you would have to divide and share the registered daylily. It is getting harder to come up with unique names for daylilies. With almost 80,000 registered ... that is probably one of the biggest challenges of a hybridizer!

And I agree, that the possibility is there to have a seedling look very similar to one of the parents. Example is CCC02:



My seedling looks a lot like the pollen parent. If you look back into the pedigree of the pod parent, you will see that the same registered daylily is also on that side of the family line, too. Which is why I believe it turned out to look so much like the pollen parent. Dominating the characteristics for this cross. I had a second seedling, and it too, looked very similar.

And no, a plant that looks similar would NOT necessarily adopt a part of the F1 parent's name that it resembles. In fact, if it looked that much like the registered plant, why would you even name and register it? Unless it has other outstanding traits that the F1 parent does not have, it would seem redundant to me. But that might also explain why there are close to 80,000 registered daylilies in the AHS database. Many probably do have a close resemblance to another one somewhere in the database.

I don't really understand the pedigree, so excuses for that. But SERIOUSLY!?! 80.000!!?? And then the horticultural societies complain about loosing old varieties....I think there needs to be some sort of sorting system :S How do you even pick one you like?

The pedigree will track the many of the characteristics of previous generations, and may show what attributes seem to be (or could be) passed on in certain cultivars whether it be yellow petals, patterned eyes, ruffles, etc. These are characteristics that are passed on from the current or later generations.

I couldn't agree more with you .... about how to pick even one among 80,000 cultivars! New come in and the old often get lost in the shuffle of the annual newest introduction plants. But that is also the reason daylilies are sooooo popular. The variety is astonishing! AND .... anyone can name and register their own seedling for $20.