SueVT said:
It seems to me that all hybridizers should be required to be members of the ADS, otherwise why even have the ADS?
That's a good point, I'm not sure if membership is a requirement. It would be to the advantage of the society to place as few restrictions as possible on the registration process. As for why have the society, I'm sure there's a mission statement somewhere.
What I was really driving at is the definition of "hybridizer". There are a lot of people hybridizing daylilies who have never registered a daylily. I feel like they're hybridizers too, but there's no way to know that number, which was my original point.
There are nurserymen involved with fairly large concerns who have widely marketed unregistered, but "named", landscape plants. Some of those plants may have been patented. I don't know if there's any requirement that a patented plant be registered with a plant society. It would be nice if those hybridizers and the nurseries they work for cared about registration, but they often don't. It seems to be two different worlds.
I noticed that at least one hybridizer offers the ability for customers to name and register one of their seedlings.
There's more than one way to sell a daylily. They probably do the registration for the customer as part of the package, that way anyone can buy/name/dedicate a plant. In a way, it reminds me of a Star Registry, only the buyer actually receives a product.
I think there is a continuum of value among the 80000 cultivars in the database, from these otherwise-culled plants through the best work of serious hybridizers.
Absolutely. You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been. That's why I think it's important for a hybridizer to grow and observe the parents they breed with and even some of their ancestors.
I don't remember where I heard this, but a hybridizer once said that it takes 10 years to establish a breeding program. I don't doubt it a bit. A lot of that time is spent learning which plants are good parents, as well as how to effectively select and cull. Now that I think about it, ten years sounds like a Florida number, where a lot of 9-month seedlings bloom.
