beckygardener said:So it is basically a prayer and a hope that you get what you are hoping for in a bloom through a particular cross?
To some extent.
Genetics is a numbers game. The more seedlings one grows from a cross the more likely it is that something "more extreme" or "better" will appear.
Some hybridizers will make crosses with the hope that they will find seedlings that are better than their parents. They might be looking for longer teeth, or for a wider picotee edge or for longer petals, or for taller scapes, etc. They are selecting for the characteristic and they expect to make relatively slow but steady progress in the direction of their goal. They might cross their best cultivar with a half inch gold picotee with their next best flower with a half inch gold picotee and if they found an equally good seedling with a gold picotee that was wider than a half inch they would keep it and discard the rest. They might do this for purples, pinks, lavenders, etc.
Other hybridizers may have a different sort of goal. For example, they might feel that there were too few spidery cultivars with patterned eyes. Or they might feel that there were too few spidery cultivars with gold picotees, etc. They might cross spidery cultivars without picotees with non-spiders with the widest gold picotees they could obtain in the hopes that some of the seedlings would not be too round and would have a bit of a gold picotee. Even if they did not find any seedlings with the characteristics they were looking for they might still keep some of the seedlings to use in other crosses hoping that the next generation might have some seedlings with both characteristics to some extent.
That would explain why so many seedlings are culled by daylily breeders. Breeders are looking for something in their seedlings that is very specific or on a narrow scope. If they don't get it in a seedling, the seedling is culled?
They are usually looking for something that is noticeably better than what is readily available. Lets say I measured the flower size of 1000 cultivars and found that only 1% had flowers ten inches or larger. I take all my daylilies that have eight inch or larger flowers and cross them with each other. I am going to discard all the seedlings that do not have at least a nine inch flower. I might only be able to keep three out every hundred seedlings. I cross all the seedlings with nine inch flowers together and in this next generation I am only going to keep seedlings that had at least ten inch flowers. I might only be able to keep one or two seedlings out of every hundred. The more severely one selects the quicker the characteristic changes in our breeding population. But unfortunately, usually also the more inbred the population becomes and the less generally robust. What proportion of seedlings one keeps (and what proportion one discards) depends on how strongly one is selecting.
