Great question! Here's an excerpt from my ATP article on daylilies: “I developed definite preferences early on as I began sifting through daylilies on hundreds of websites. (Googling "daylily" generates over 600,000 hits.) There was more than a little irony in what my preference for color turned out to be: Orange! (which I had always considered as too common a color) That’s especially odd, given that my favorite color is blue. I would have been out of luck searching for blue daylilies, though, because there are no solid true-blue ones. Yet. And that's not for lack of trying.
Other preferences that manifested themselves along the way included an inclination toward cultivars that have rich colors. I avoided colors that were muted or muddy. Pastels just didn’t excite me. As it turned out, I was even less excited by toothy petal edges and most doubles. As one hybridizer put it, “doubles often look like crumpled, used tissues.”
I hasten to add that in expressing my preferences I don’t mean to offend those who love teeth or doubles. The doubles I do like are those that are consistently fully formed or are strictly hose-in-hose. The operative word here is “consistently.” I came across so many cultivars whose double forms were all over the map, from single blooms, to a few odd petals here and there, to fully double, all on the same plant. I especially appreciated those growers who stated right up front that the blossoms of a given cultivar were actually double only X% of the time. Numbers ranged as low as 50%.”
Already my preferences are changing since I wrote that article. I'm particularly enamored of the beautiful patterned cultivars that Mark Carpenter and Nicole Devito have released in the past few years.
