WeedySeedy: Hi, and
to ATP (All Things Plants)! Thanks for sharing your pictures. Perhaps Terry or others will be able to make some observations about the species they may be. And, If I understand correctly, you may have four questions in all:
1. How to know what species you actually have.
2. How to choose two of those different daylily species to cross in order to get red eyed, red petal flowers that bloom during the Early or Extra Early season (or did you mean that you hope for Early Morning Openers that occur during any part of the blooming season?).
3. How to understand why two yellow species may be the ones that may produce that red-eyed, red flower.
4. How to cross the chosen species plants even if they have very different blooming times (for example, nocturnal crosses with diurnal daytime bloomers)?
Is that a fair summary of what you'd like to learn about? If so, you are probably in good company ... we are all hoping to learn how to increase our chances for producing flowers that we would like. It may be helpful to struggle along with the rest of us for a while as we try to understand some basic genetics information. If we can get to a point where we understand the core concepts, we'll have more tools to help guide us toward our goals.
Cindy: I think anyone who tries to understand concepts about tings that we cannot readily see (the hidden genes and chromosomes) is very courageous. It can be very hard to even understand that such things exist, until some external event results in some remarkable pattern showing up (inherited diseases, growth and maturation, different sibling's eye colors, etc).
Seedfork: I'm still smiling, too, as I work on understanding the whole "genes and chromosomes" thing (I love the "taking aim on understanding" you mentioned - what a great phrase to motivate and focus the learning process!). Sometimes re-reading chapters will do it for me, and at other times I try to find videos that might help me just suddenly "get it". There is one from Scientific American that, after watching a couple of times (only 2 minutes long) started to get the concept a little clearer for me, at least so I think.
From it, I will summarize again what I think are the two basic levels found in Daylilies, and this matches up with what is in the first few pages of Chapter 3:
1. Inside each cell that makes up a daylily, there is a nucleus that contains twenty-two chromosomes that pair up with each other (11 inherited from one parent will pair up with the 11 inherited from the other parent).
2. Inside those paired chromosomes from the parents are copies of the parent's genes which then interact and function as the blueprint for building and regulating the form of the child plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
From another video, there was an analogy of two sets of encyclopedia books (11 volumes in each set), with the information that is inherited from each parent. Each offspring, then, has a combined set of matching volumes (some of the chromosome "volumes" contain blueprints for making scapes of a certain height, others are for color, and so on). By combining those two sets of encyclopedias we will get some information from one parent that overrides or silences the other's set of instructions, or sometimes both will mix their information together in a new way that shows up in the offspring. Even when one parent's information is overridden, the data is still there and might show up later in another generation. And, when two parents create many offspring, each may show different parts of those bits of hidden information.
What we hope to learn by understanding something about these genetic functions is how to increase our odds at having crosses that will override for the specific instructions we want (color, height) and silence those that we don't want (disease, weak scapes). So, we are in search of which volumes of the encyclopedia contain those instructions, and then want to use that information to choose parents that have similar instructions (seen or unseen, as long as they have the data, as it may yield the desired results).
Hope that is a legitimate analogy, and makes some sense? ...
