Color is a hard one. People see colors differently and the same daylily can vary from garden to garden depending on climate, soil (esp minerals) and culture. And then you have daylilies that show up a different color in pictures. I bought one that looked rich buttery yellow in pics, but when it bloomed in my garden it was a somewhat pale gold. Yet when I took pictures of it, the pics always came out rich buttery yellow like the seller's pics don't ask me why. Many times I've looked up daylilies on this site and sometimes the diff pics people have uploaded are so different in hue they almost look like different daylilies.
My problem is describing flower colors. Even when I'm looking right at the flower and seeing it clearly, I often have trouble finding the correct words to describe what I'm seeing. I think it would help to have an art degree! There are so many different purples, and so many reds. The industry standard for plant colors is the RHS Colour Chart. I looked into getting that, but it's hard to find and very expensive.
I would think all the parentage info we've been talking about would have to be voluntary. Seems to me it's a double-edged sword for a hybridizer to keep parentage secret. They can prevent others from knowing what parents they used, but they'd get far more sales if they let people know, because many other hybridizers want to know what's in there and will avoid intros that don't identify the parents. Plus, there was some study done years back about trying to reproduce an intro by crossing the same two parents again and the author came up with some kind of odds like 15,000 to 1 that you'd ever get the same result. There are certain crosses that tend to yield a high percentage of intro-worthy seedlings, but even there, once a hybridizer has discovered this and developed intros from it, they already have at least a two-year jump on everyone else.
