There can be much misinformation and assumptions made about tissue cultured plants, particularly daylilies. I have looked at some aspects of tissue culturing, and tissue culturing daylilies and big box store daylilies that were not true-to-name or that apparently were not true-to-name.
A potential problem with big box store daylilies that also can affect specialist daylily growers is that over time and independently cultivars can become misidentified. For example, I bought daylilies labelled as 'Stella de Oro' over and over again and did not receive what I considered to be the correct cultivar. I finally did but I expect that a large number of people are growing small yellow daylilies they bought as Stella that are not. How does that happen. One way is if you are growing thousands of Stella plants in field after field you probably are not deadheading them. After a few years the fields will no longer be all Stella. Those fields supply big box stores.
Another potential problem is that plants supplied to big box stores are typically grown in greenhouses over winter. There is insufficient light in greenhouses in northern areas for good growth and flower colours can be severely affected. One test daylily I purchased, presumed to be tissue-cultured (tc), did not flower with its true colours for many weeks after purchase but did in the end produce flowers that were identical to the vegetatively divided version growing nearby. Poor growth during greenhouse production can have "carry-over" effects that can last until the next year.
So, if you purchase a cultivar from a big box store and it does not seem quite right the first year wait and check it the next year and try moving it to different spots in your garden to see how it grows.
There are different ways to tissue culture plants. One way is to force the plant to create growing points (shoot apical meristems) from parts that were not destined to do that. So the plant cells make a callus. The callus is then divided into small pieces and grown larger and then divided again and so on until there are enough portions to produce plants. If the callus is used for too long then changes can accumulate and the final products are not all necessarily true to the original. That is poor tissue culture technique.
However there are other methods, which use normal shoot apical meristems and produce many normal shoots from an original meristem. Those techniques are typically true to the original. That is more or less what any one who takes proliferations and grows them is doing. A proliferation is a reproductive meristem that reverted to a vegetative meristem because the plant abnormally produced hormones.
Lastly, it is unlikely that any vegetatively produced clone is genetically 100% identical to the original plant. That is because mutations, although rare, happen. Even though a new mutation may only happen once in a million times there are tens of thousands of genes in each daylily cell and there are millions of cells in every daylily plant. When a daylily plant grows it produces many generations of cells and at each generation mutations can occur. The longer ago a daylily was registered and the longer ago divisions were separated the more genetically different the divisions will be.
Growers of some perennials, for example Easter lilies, find that too many changes accumulate over time and reselect the bulbs they use to propagate the lilies in their fields every ten years. Each grower's Easter lilies are slightly different from each others in some characteristics (and genetically) even though they are all the same vegetatively propagated cultivar 'Nellie White'.
