Deryll said:So, if all of the people growing daylilies in warmer areas stop growing them, it would go away?

Yes, in areas where it is warm enough for it to otherwise winter over because the daylilies don't die back. But they're also the people who are primarily affected by it so it wouldn't make much difference to the rest of us. In Asia it doesn't have to be warm even though the daylilies are deciduous because the rust does its full life cycle using Patrinia. So far there are no reports of infected Patrinia plants in North America and they are not commonly grown. It's because of Patrinia that this rust can persist in very cold places like Siberia.

Soooo, let me get this straight...

If I decide someday that I want to sell daylilies, the people in warmer climates want me to go through all of the extra work to
record my crosses and keep all of those seedlings separated to help promote "rust resistance" and make things easier for
them to grow daylilies when they are the ones responsible for the spread of the disease in the first place???

There are a wide variety of things that have restrictions in the world, with certain states here at the top of the list that ban
things being shipped to their states, but no restrictions for those things being shipped out of their states. Why then is it fair
to little guys like me to go through all of this for those people? Can you see where I am going, and why I feel the way I do?

Besides that! My opinion is that publishing your crosses is a lot like KFC publishing the secret recipe! If I tell you my crosses,
why would you need to buy my plants? Sounds like the disclaimer on my DVD's about how piracy is not a victimless crime.
Publishing my crosses might possibly hurt me in the end.

Deryll, how you would market your daylilies if you ever decided to sell commercially would be totally up to you. It would be up to the customer to decide to buy from you are not because you did or did not keep records. That is how business works. Normally the better the product and the better the service the greater the price for the product, and the more sales are made. I think it is perfectly fair to the little guy or the big sellers for the customer to purchase from the business that delivers the products and services they want. If people down south know that you don't do anything to prevent rust, and the people up north know you don't keep any records to know if a plant is hardy in their region, and the people out west know you aren't aware if any of your plants are drought tolerant, and etc. there would likely be very few sales. You, just stating that all the plants you sell do very well in your own garden, might be enough info for some people to go ahead and buy your plants. Most would not want to even risk the shipping cost on that basis.
There is a huge difference in growing plants as a hobby and as a business, the customer may not be always right, but they do determine the number of sales.

Deryll said:Soooo, let me get this straight...

If I decide someday that I want to sell daylilies, the people in warmer climates want me to go through all of the extra work to
record my crosses and keep all of those seedlings separated to help promote "rust resistance" and make things easier for
them to grow daylilies when they are the ones responsible for the spread of the disease in the first place???

Excuse me?!

That's a little harsh to blame southern daylily growers. This disease likely came from overseas .... China and was imported to America and spread in the early years of 2000.

spunky1 said:I think I will just step back before things get nasty.

Here is a smart earlier post on this subject. What great foresight.
My two cents.
To each his/her own no matter where you are. We all make choices everyday. Some we learn from. My motto is respect what the other gardeners want to do on their dime, sweat, property and time. There is a reason why the Almighty created so many different plants. This lead us to the diversified forums here @ garden.org and elsewhere.
DW is my biggest critic, but I plug on because I am doing all the work. Not everyone is going to like the way I garden. Who cares. Same goes for the next person. If you want to spend your time keeping records or not, by all means go ahead. Freedom of choice is all that matters. I am not here to persuade anyone to do something my way. By the same token, if someone has a great idea that I believe will help me in any way I will try it.
Let's get BACK to gardening, "known or unknown".

Thanks Mike.

I want to add, that I no longer have serious outbreaks of rust since adding rust resistant cultivars. By being selective in my cultivar choices, rust is no longer a major issue for me. I do get the ocassional rust susceptible cultivar and do see rust, but it typically is just a problem for that plant, not all my daylilies. Which is just one reason why I prefer to know parentage. It helps me personally. If you don't have the need to know parentage, then I respect that.

In a breeding program - whether a professional breeder or a hobby breeder, it can be very helpful to also know parentage to attain your seedling goal. There are some outstanding cultivars to use for parentage and many of us share that knowledge here on this forum and within our own Daylily communities.

To each his own. I am only sharing my perspective since the topic was brought up. Daylilies are a wonderful plant family and very popular among gardeners world wide!

Spring has sprung here! Bloom on!

"Why then is it fair
to little guys like me to go through all of this for those people?"

Deryll, long before I ever thought about selling daylilies, I became enchanted by the pretty faces. But some of them had the short scapes, they were evergreen, or whatever I figured would make them not suitable for my garden. So, I set off to make my own daylily. I pick out a flower, I look on the database, and lo and behold, there's no history. It's like getting hit in the face by a concrete wall.

The money didn't stop me (except for the one that was $700.00!). It might take me awhile to save it up, but that would only slow me down.

Am I gonna call that hybridizer that doesn't keep records, and ask about that flower? Rely on memories? Sounds like a waste of my time. And, I'm telling you, registered or not, there's a million of 'em out there!

Here's what I do, I find another flower that's similar, but has a history attached.

"If I tell you my crosses,
why would you need to buy my plants? "

Are you kidding me? Haven't you seen all the sibling pics on these forums? What makes you think that YOU got the one and only seed?

Awww, c'mon. Share your toys!

I read somewhere that crosses should still be made using older, beautiful, very worthwhile cultivars. I've seen some of them, and been impressed.

Sometimes they don't come with history, or only on the one side. Back then, that's all you had to work with. But, honestly, the site that fired me up on this subject had plant after plant with no parent history. And, maybe I'd be buying them if their appearance was blowing my mind. But they weren't. They were sweet and beautiful, but like a row of very expensive cookies!

I know, these plants are coming from the hybridizers own program, and are all unnamed seedlings. But, if I'm growing the children from these plants, I'm not going to like the way unknown x unknown looks on their pedigree. Seriously, it looks sloppy, lazy, or like someone has something to hide. Are THEY not proud of the plants they're using?

I can't change the registration myself, so at least strive to put "seedling" on there. In MY perfect world, I'm wanting the whole package!

For what it is worth, I have a very focused line bred program and would not buy any plant that does not have parentage information. One thing you should know is that even if the hybridizer provides parentage information on the registration form, i.e., pod parent: Seedling (blah blah x blah) x (blah x blah blah), the registration can come back as SEEDLING without the blah blah info. This was particularly true under the administration of one particular registrar but it has happened as recently as this year. So it is not always the fault of the person who registered a plant that information is incomplete on the official registration. I made the mistake of including an unregistered daylily from Goldner (garden name "Cabbage Butterfly") as a parent and because that plant was not registered, that one was changed to "seedling" as well. While you can often find parentage on web sites and in garden catalogs, it is of concern to me on the older cultivars where hybridizers have passed away or no longer keep the plant on their web page. I am starting to eliminate some of my own registrations from my web site due to lack of garden space to continue selling them.

Fear of having someone copying your cross should not be a factor in providing complete registration information. There is only about a 1 in 10,000 chance of someone coming up with a look alike to your registration. I personally am not able to completely explore every cross that I make and appreciate people discovering "what else" might be in my gene pool that I've overlooked.

Unknowns are completely understandable....things happen.....tags fade or get destroyed, markers get broken, trees fall on your seedling bed, the cat upsets 10 seedling cups, etc. I've had a few where I've forgotten to scribble out a tag before using the other side so it's an "either/or" in my records that must be recorded as an unknown for registration purposes. MANY times the hybridizer who keeps meticulous records can tell you their "best guess" or what the unknown probably is. I think keeping records is important not only for line breeding but also for NOT making an unproductive cross over and over again. Some daylilies consistently give ugly kids. And it's a waste of your space using bad parents.

Thank you for that insight into the registration process, Judy. I have to say that it is somewhat dismaying that information can actually be lost during the registration process.

Your comments also emphasize to me (something I already learned the hard way, but not with respect to parentage) the importance of keeping a record of the hybridizer's comments on the plant, before such information disappears.

sooby said:There are multiple species of rust fungi, something like 7,000, but, there is only one species that affects daylilies - Puccinia hemerocallidis. However there is more than one strain of Puccinia hemerocallidis in circulation and a given daylily cultivar may be more resistant or susceptible to each of the different strains. So yes, resistance or not of a cultivar may depend on which strain or strains one has in a garden.

This, of course, doesn't mean one shoudn't try to select for rust resistence. Go for it - and more power to you.

Thank you, Glen.

It is undoubtedly the case that we have more than one strain of rust, and that a daylily may be resistant to one strain, but not another.

That is no excuse, imo, for at least not trying to do something beneficial in terms of hybridizing. You may not want to bother to search out resistant parents, but you can at least cull susceptible seedlings. Better yet, stop using known badly susceptible daylilies as parents.

I haven't had rust (yet?) in the 2 years that I grow Daylilies, so I don't know much about it...
Is it like flu, new strains emerging over time?

Do I understand correctly that rust is relatively new in the USA?
That must have been a shock...
I guess that from the DL's before that time it isn't known whether they are rust-resistant.
How is the susceptability determined? Is someone 'out there' doing official tests or can everybody who has a certain DL in their garden enter their findings in the database and alter the ratings for that plant?
If so, wouldn't that make the ratings very subjective..?

The fact that there are different strains and that a DL may be susceptible for one strain but not a / all others (that is correct, right?) must also be very frustrating

Mayo

I wouldn't say it's exactly like the flu, where you get different strains circulating in a particular year and then different ones in another year but that's an interesting question. I would assume as each strain evolves in one garden, it could be shipped to another or spread on the wind locally. Unless it dies out it could still be in circulation or it could remain local. But yes, new strains can keep on emerging but I don't think at a high rate when you consider that there is a new generation of spores every couple of weeks under the most favourable rust environmental conditions, and each rust spot can produce 1-2,000 spores in 24 hours.

It's relatively new in the United States, first reported around the year 2000. It's been known since the 1800s in Asia.

There have been formal scientific tests (the numerical rust ratings in the NGA database are based on those). The database also has another system of shows resistance or shows susceptibility. Since it only reflects what the last person to edit it entered, I wouldn't personally find a "shows resistance" rating very useful simply because susceptibility varies depending on the environmental conditions. Scientific research can only do so much because there are just way too many daylily cultivars for more than a small proportion of them to be tested.

Yes, a daylily may be more susceptible or resistant to different strains. We had hoped this rust would be slow to develop new strains because it doesn't appear to be completing its full life cycle in North America as it does in Asia (which involves patrinia plants) but it has managed to do it anyway.

Hope I answered all the questions adequately.

With one exception, the only edits I have made (or at least, recall making, or tried to make) to the database have been to indicate susceptibility (as observed in my garden), and I don't make such edits unless such susceptibility is pretty clear, roughly comparable to cultivars having a database rust score of 2.9 or worse. (I have a 2.9 benchmark plant here, as well as other plants which, had they been part of a survey, I suspect would have scored worse.) If a plant gets a light and limited case of rust, I won't report it as "shows susceptiblity", because in this everything-is-relative world (where no daylily has immunity), such plants are probably "resistant".

The one exception involved a well known cultivar which I grow, and which per the database has a resistance score (derived from surveys) of 1.1, indicating excellent resistance. This cultivar has shown resistance in my garden, under fairly heavy rust exposure, where everything else around it got rust. Someone edited the entry to indicate "shows susceptibility", because in their garden the cultivar is susceptible. That was a surprise to me, but this may have been a case of resistance to some strains, susceptibility to others (they may have had a different strain of rust circulating in their garden).

Apart from that one instance (where "shows susceptibility" clearly seemed in conflict with the rust score of 1.1, apart from my personal experience of the cultivar), I don't edit the database to indicate "shows resistance". Even ignoring the "different strains" issue, resistance is something that can sometimes be hard to pin down (at least in our climate), whereas an obviously good case of rust (raised golden orange pustules in abundance, etc.) is undeniable. Microclimate can also play a part as to whether a plant "seems" resistant or not. For years, I thought one particular (potted) cultivar was resistant, but last fall (after it had been planted out near a rust bucket) it got a good case of rust. Another daylily, formerly grown in a pot without rust, got rust last summer after it was transplanted into the ground (and was subject to irrigation spray). (I have yet to submit edits for those two plants, as I wish to get a better sense of how susceptible they are... again, there is that issue of where the dividing line is between "shows resistance" and "shows susceptibility".)

A few years ago there was an ongoing rust survey created by an AHS member and it was interesting to see how, for some cultivars, the ratings for them in different gardens varied. They could be all over the map for the same cultivar, resistant, susceptible, somewhere in between (there were five grades if I recall correctly). Some cultivars were more consistent. As Polymerous said, microclimates can make a big difference even within a garden, move a daylily from one spot to another and its apparent resistance/susceptibility changes. Now we also know there are different strains. Some can also take a lot longer to show any visible rust. So in the NGA database I would place more weight on a shows susceptibility rating than a shows resistance one, because low rust or lack of rust can merely be the result of environmental factors. In the NGA ratings anyone can come along and change shows susceptibility to shows resistance. On the AHS associated survey a cultivar was not shown on the list of rated cultivars until there were at least three reports from three different gardens. I'd rather it had been at least five but with so many daylily cultivars out there and everyone growing a different mix it would have meant very few cultivars were rated. Unfortunately due to technical issues the AHS-associated survey no longer exists.

Has there been any research into the possible different characeristics of the strains and how they came into being?

I mean, if strain A is present in 2 different locations across the USA, will they both evolve over time into strain B? Or could one become strain B and the other strain C?
And seeing that in your country there are different strains now after 17 years, is it known how many strains came originally into the country from Asia? Or was that just 1 strain?

Is it known whether all strains need the same circumstances to spread and do they die at the same temperature? Is moving a DL from one place in the garden to another a problem, because for instance the temperature in that new place is different and a particulair strain of rust can only grow under those circumstances?

It's all só interesting!! I wish had the education and opportunity to research this myself!

Mayo

I think it is important that those who keep data on rust be encourged to do so.

I find rust scores useful. It is a good way to avoid rust buckets. Ignore a high susceptability score at one's peril, is my experience.

Besides different strains, however, there is the problem that some cultivars are not what they are sold as. I was first alerted to the problem of identity of two of my cultivars by the gross differences between my rust scores and that published. This is more noid x noid or (noid x noid) x (noid x noid).