beckygardener said:So could this earlier blooming time for the younger siblings be genetic, enviromental, or unknown? Or do young/new seedlings tend to bloom earlier than their genetic make-up would normally allow as an older seedling?
It could be purely genetic, purely environmental, purely genotype X environment interaction or any combination of two of the factors or any combination of all three - whichever is unknown.
Young/new seedlings may bloom earlier (or later or at a different time) than their genetic make-up would normally allow. We do not have scientific objective information about how bloom times would change with the age (or more precisely the size) of a daylily. I suspect that the bloom time will change from first bloom cycle to later bloom cycles and not settle down until the plant has reached its maximum mature size and is blooming and producing new fans at a stable rate. A fan will not bloom (under normal circumstances) until it has reached adult/mature size, but that does not mean it cannot continue to grow larger and its flowering characteristics may change as it grows larger.
Many years ago I measured the size of the fans of a cultivar in my growing conditions. By size I measured the width of each fan at the soil surface. I also counted the number of leaves, measured the height of the scape and counted the buds. I found that the wider the fans, the more leaves, the taller the scape and the more buds. I measured the same characteristics on another cultivar and found the same thing. Two years ago I measured the width of the fans of a cultivar that reblooms here and I also classified the fans as to whether they bloomed once in that growing season, rebloomed or did not bloom at all. I found that the wider the fan (that is, the larger the fan) the more likely the fans were to rebloom. Flowering characteristics seem to be affected by fan size.
It is possible that larger fans bloom
on average at different times than smaller fans of the same cultivar - we do not know.
