Sue - I appreciate your response very much! I know my front garden bed border of daylilies gets quite hot. Definitely in the 90's if not the 100's. We've been having quite a bit of rain lately, so that may be enabling the rust to grow and spread around my garden beds.
Yes, the shaded raised daylily beds are shaded by trees & the house during part of the day. The foliage on some of the seedlings do show some mild rust, but many do not show any rust. Not sure if they have developed some sort of resistance or if the shade is playing a part in this. Those plants don't look as "stressed" as the full sun daylilies. Could that play a part? I have a mix of seedlings all around. I have no idea what the parentage is on 99% of them, but many have blooms that look similar, so I am guessing there may be some siblings among my 300+ seedlings in the 4 different raised beds (2 partial shade beds, 2 full sun beds).
I will tell you that I moved all the seedlings that are currently in the partial shade beds from the full sun beds. And many of them had full blown rust fungus on them last year in the full sun beds. I am rather surprised that this year some have a slight outbreak of rust instead of full blown rust attack. And some are NOT showing signs of rust at all. I am pretty surprised by this because most of them looked really bad last year. What is your thoughts on this? My area had a very mild winter this year, too. Most of my daylilies are evergreens or semi-evergreens. So they never completely died back to the ground. I don't quite know what to make of this.
