kousa said:Thanks very much, Maurice! The above info is so helpful! Can I presume that the above applies to tets as well? Or is there some difference in how foliage type inheritance works in tets? Based on what you said above, there is actually only two foliage types, evergreen and dormant. And within the evergreen type, there are 2 subtypes, evergrowing and nongrowing until the right seasonal conditions come around. The evergrowing type probably would not perform well in the north because it expenses too much energy in ever growing foliage that keeps getting killed down by cold temps.
@kousa
You are very welcome.
I am not sure that what applies to diploid daylilies necessarily applies to tetraploid daylilies in exactly the same way. It may do. I have not yet extracted the same information from the registration database for tetraploids and counted the possibilities. There is a basic reason why I do not simply assume that the situation in tetraploids is the same as that in diploids.
Stout postulated that there was a single gene that was involved with "dormant"/non-dormant ("evergreen"). We could use d to represent the dormant form (allele) and D to represent the evergreen form (allele) of the gene. Lower case means recessive and upper case means dominant, Stout indicated that "dormant" daylilies would be dd and "evergreen"/non-dormant daylilies would Dd or DD. The behaviour of dd and DD should be simple. It is the behaviour of Dd that might not be simple. That is because dominance can take different levels. It can be complete in which case Dd plants would be exactly the same as DD plants or it can be incomplete. When it is incomplete it can be partial, meaning that the characteristic in Dd plants would not be quite the same as that in DD plants but it would be closer to that of DD plants than it would be to halfway between that of DD and dd plants. Or Dd plants might be halfway between DD and dd plants when it would be described as additive rather than dominant.
It does not appear that Stout's simple conclusion about the inheritance of "dormant" versus "evergreen" is complete for diploids. When it comes to its inheritance in tetraploids it is likely to be even more complicated. That relies on the finding that even when the inheritance of characteristics in diploids is simple, it often is more complex in tetraploids. That is often because although in diploids the heterozygote (Dd in this case) appears to the observer to be exactly the same as the homozygote (DD in this case) it is not really. That difference might become more visibly obvious (in this case) in the genotypes Dddd, DDdd, and DDDd.
It is not possible to tell from a single generation of results how a characteristic is inherited. We need more than the F1 generation. To specifically be able to identify whether only one gene is involved we need two more generations, the F2 generation and the F3 generation and at the same time as we produce the F2 generation we need to produce backcrosses to both parents.
Foliage types - deciduous versus evergreen
Growth habits - "dormant" capable versus "dormant" incapable or evergrowing
Bear in mind that in cold winter climates most coniferous (evergreen) trees are "dormant" in winter.
I have been bringing daylilies inside during winter for a number of years to protect some less hardy cultivars from winter and to look into what daylilies do for winter.
Daylilies hybridized in Florida and registered as "evergreen" can and do go "dormant". Both 'Mississippi Bill Robinson' and 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' (CBP) have done so, CBP each year it has been inside during winter.
'Mississippi Bill Robinson' (Salter-E.H., 2016) height 32 in.(81 cm), bloom 3.5 in.(9 cm), season EM, Rebloom,
Evergreen, Diploid, Medium lavender with a precise and intricate eye of lavender violet and cream lavender. (unknown × unknown)
'Crystal Blue Persuasion' (Salter-E.H., 1996) height 18 in.(46 cm), bloom 2.75 in.(7 cm), season M, Rebloom,
Evergreen, Diploid, Pale lavender with slate blue pencil edge magenta eyezone and green throat.