Natalie, this is for you! lol
I've had a few blooms from Florida plants, but this is in conditions that are very far from what would normally send up a scape even... so not the hybridizers' faults! This is my first year with plants from Florida and I'm trying to figure things out, like when I prefer them to ship to me way up here or if I should always cut all scapes off and at what point I can just let them grow, etc. I cut all scapes off my earliest order as it arrived early-mid April and I had to pot them up and move them indoors a lot. The first bloom came from the second delivery, which was my first order to plant out directly. I had high hopes leaving the scapes on, but they were dashed when the first bloom opened May 30th.
I definitely won't say what it was. lol
And this one is a bonus from the earlier order. I left one scape on to see how it improves from bloom to bloom.
FFO (well, almost) on this one in the morning May 31... looked like it had so much potential for a FFO...
...but in the afternoon it rained before I could snap a photo of it open (sort of)... it wasn't looking too good before the rain anyway!
The next bloom June 2 was looking closer to how it should...
And from the same scape, this opened yesterday, but the pic is from this morning.
Surely this will be ugly at first too, but I can't help but get excited looking at the contrast on the edge already.
Slowly getting there! It's going to be an exciting bloom season for me. I've grown daylilies for the last decade maybe, but just a few older varieties until last year when I added a handful of newer ones and made some crosses. This year I splurged and added something like 90... so it should be a fun year!