Maurice, you are knowledgeable about so much! I was just reading your page about dormants and evergreens. Would you by any chance know how to clone plants ,ie vegetative propagation,
and be able to explain it in a way that a dummy like me can understand it? I have seen it on the learning channel, but they didn't tell you what the jell stuff in the Petrie dish was, or the temp to
keep it until the plantlets begin to form. This really fascinates me!

@Deryll,
There are several different ways to clone a plant.

The simplest is to thoroughly clean the crown of a daylily fan. Remove all the roots and all the leaves and then to cut the crown into quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and so on (basically into small pieces that still have the ability to produce axillary buds but no longer have their primary growing point).

Now those pieces need to be placed in a gel (agar or similar plant gels not animal gelatin) with minerals and some plant hormones. The plant hormones are not that much different from the plant hormones used to get roots to form (the plant hormones that are present in rooting gels and powders).

The result is that each piece of the original crown produces a handful of new fans.

The alternate way is to take a small piece of a daylily. Place that in the agar gel with minerals but this time with a different mixture and concentration of plant hormones to get the piece of tissue to lose its identity and then become a growing point to produce a new fan.

The temperature to keep the cultures at would be any reasonable temperature at which daylilies grow. I would think that 25C or 78F would be close to optimum.

Maurice, thank you so much!!! I have a special daylily that only produces one fan each year, and it is probably too late in the season to do it now, but I will definitely give it a try next year. I have
some plant gel for rooting cuttings, will that work, or would you suggest something else? If I can actually do this, you will be my greatest hero!

Sorry, it will probably take much more than rooting gel to get your daylily to produce more fans.

To tissue culture or micropropagate a daylily requires that the crown of the daylily is completely bacteria and fungus free. It has to be antiseptic in its cleanliness. Even with utmost sterilizing many of the cultures will still become contaminated and destroyed.

The gels that are used have a considerable number of chemicals in them. Most of these are the same sorts of chemicals as are in soluble complete fertilizers with micronutrients but not necessarily in the same ratios. The plant hormones are similar to those used for rooting but not the same. The gels are not the same as rooting gels.

Before considering tissue culturing your daylily it might be a good idea to check on the growing conditions.

As a first step it is important to know all about the growing conditions that your daylily experiences. Is it in full sun for all day? Does it get water at regular intervals? Does it get optimum fertilizer? Is it well separated from other plants?

Maurice, now it is starting to sound a little more out of my realm of possibility. As for growing conditions, I have almost 2000 daylilies, many of them seedlings. I will normally get a bloom after
one year, and sometimes as many as five scapes the first year. This one will only produce one scape per year. It is my only registered plant so far, and I have people wanting one. Perhaps I
had just better wait a few more years until it increases on its own. I would love to be able to do this though. Have you done it, or are you just very well educated? When I saw it on TV I was
totally captivated. I totally missed my calling.

I have not tissue cultured any plant. Researchers have published their methods specifically for daylilies in a number of different journals. There are probably professional laboratories that will tissue culture a plant for a fee. There are probably some that specialize in daylilies. I personally do not know of any.

To get increase from a plant it needs to receive optimum growing conditions and to use all the energy it receives to grow rather than to flower or produce seeds. If a gardener/hybridizer wants to push a plant to increase then the plant should not be allowed to flower. Remove the scape as soon as you see it. Usually that also means pushing the growth with high nitrogen fertilizer or just nitrogen fertilizer throughout the growing season. Keeping the plant mulched to conserve soil moisture is also a good strategy.

Tissue culturing a plant pretty much requires a laboratory setup and dedication to chemistry lab techniques. There are web-sites that encourage "kitchen table"/home tissue culturing and a dedicated amateur can manage to tissue culture plants but it is not simple. It probably has a steep learning curve with many losses along the way.

There is a method which involves cutting a crown into quarters or smaller sizes and then using a plant hormone such as BAP to get increase. However, simply cutting a crown into quarters should produce four new plants (even without using any plant hormones) if the pieces are treated optimally. This is like cutting the top off a stem of any plant, say a rose. What happens next is that the stem can no longer grow until one or more of the buds further down sprouts. The same idea applies to daylily crowns. In the centre of the leaves of a fan is the growing point. If that is destroyed then the crown can produce new buds from in-between where the leaves were. What one ends up with, if one is lucky and say all four pieces produce new buds and all four survive, is four new fans where before there was only one. The catch is that the four new fans are usually smaller than 1/4 of the old original fan.

Maurice,
The fan that was cut in half up through the crown when I purchased it, did sprout a new fan out each side. The center then died out.

For those who are members of the AHS - American Hemerocallis Society.

The AHS has an archive of nearly all of the Daylily Journals on its member web-site.

In one of the issues there is an article describing how one can increase daylily fans without the use of plant hormones by cutting the crown into pieces. It does suggest that using a fungicide will help prevent the loss of some of the newly developing fans.

The title is "Propagation of Hemerocallis by ramet cuttage". It is in Volume 21, Number 2, 1967 beginning on page 44.

Thank you for all of the great info. I have a whole pile of old plants that I have discarded, and I intend to experiment. Not much to lose. Happy Happy