Perhaps not quite like you are expecting, but this anecdote is certainly about some background on a recent introduction. The challenge here teases one to tell their story, soooo .....
Since I was a youngster (A loooong time ago, folks) I've been interested in birds. All kinds of birds - domestic & wild - local & exotic. Plus was brought up on our common nursery rhymes as were most of yourselves ... And the two became blended in my mind when I became interested in breeding daylilies several years ago. I started casually to prepare a list of potential daylily names should I ever create a suitable seedling to introduce. (Not so far)
In my mind's-eye, for one such name, I visualized a small-flowered dark-black-purple bloom (Ideally a trumpet like Huben's 'Ice Trumpets') on a tallish multi-branched scape (SoT) ... Something like both Apps & Huben described many years ago ... A 'wildflower-like' scape that would hold several open blooms on any given day.
I had in mind to call this imagined plant '4 & 20 Blackbirds' derived from the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme 'Sing-A-Song-Of-Sixpence'. The histories of this name, the rhyme itself & the words employed had always had more than a passing interest for me.
And then daylily breeder C.M. Barnes (Slate Hill Farm?) registered & introduced 'Four And twenty Blackbirds' in 2018 thus eliminating one of my daylily daydreams - of which we all have many. (It seems certain that breeder C.M. Barnes had the same 'vision' as myself as the cultivar is certainly similar to what I'd imagined.)
As a youngster I had miscalculated & thought of 80 such blackbirds in the King's pie (4x20?), when of course, it's really only 24 birds. Plus I'd wondered back then about how his cook would get those 80 LIVE blackbirds into such a pie & bake it too? How would that work? ....
As I grew up, I was curious enough about this contradiction about 'baking live birds' to do some checking & discovered it really was true. It was an entertainment technique in medieval times in England, perhaps even elsewhere in Europe also? .... Make/bake a HUGE pie shell & 'hide' the live blackbirds inside to surprise everyone when the pie was opened at the banquet before the king & his guests! (Those 'blackbirds' were most likely European Starlings - one of their local indigenous species)
The rhyme itself evolved over time. Originally a traditional hand-me-down oral-history poem, was first put into print during the mid-1700's & then modified somewhat over the centuries.
