All those great flowers it begs me to ask this ?. Is there any guidelines when crossing two daylilies ? Other than dip. to dip & tet. To tet. What about colors , forms, height? Is there any rules as to what each flower looks like(pollen x pod) that should be followed? Thanks. Gary

James
@Mochajoe let's get some experts to elaborate on this subject again. If someone have the link to this previous discussion please chime in.
@ Sooby
@Admmad
Anyone else feel free to elaborate

I don't think there should be any rules when deciding what to cross with what. That should be simply the hybridizer's choice.
There may be some simple ideas that may help one decide what one would like to cross depending on what one wants to try to find in the offspring.
The more seedlings you grow from a cross the more likely you are to find what you are hoping to get from the cross (other things being equal).
If you cross a large flowered daylily with a small flowered daylily the average of the seedlings flower sizes will be intermediate. For small flowered seedlings cross two small flowered daylilies; for large flowered seedlings cross two large flowered daylilies. Same sort of strategy applies to tall versus short daylilies, long petaled versus round petaled, etc.

If you want to cross a small flowered daylily with a large flowered daylily and want small flowered offspring then plant a lot of seedlings; there will most likely be a few small flowered ones. If you cannot plant a lot of seedlings then cross the small flowered daylily to two or more large flowered daylilies.
Say A is a small flowered daylily, B, C , D and E are large flowered daylilies; make the crosses B x A, C x A, D x A and E x A to produce the seedlings BA, CA, DA and EA. Then cross the smallest flowered BA with the smallest flowered CA to produce BACA and cross the smallest flowered DA with the smallest flowered EA to produce DAEA. (if you are working with diploids to keep inbreeding depression as low as possible). If the flower sizes are still too large then cross the smallest flowered BACA with the smallest flowered DAEA.

Cross doubles with doubles. If you cross a double with a daylily that has "single" flowers the seedlings will nearly all or will all be single most of the time. However, the same strategy as above can be used. Say A is double and C and D are single. Cross C x A to get CA (single) and D X A to get DA (single). Then cross CA x DA to get some doubles.
Cross polymerous with polymerous daylilies. Or use the same techniques as for doubles.
Cross cristate daylilies with cristate daylilies. Or use the same techniques as for doubles.

Maurice as always, thanks for your exposition on this subject .
I hope that @MochaJoe Gary check back in to read this valuable explanation. Dave should be compensating you for being an in house resident professor on these subjects. My humble opinion of course.

If you are interested in larger teeth then cross two daylilies with the largest teeth you can obtain. The same thing for larger ruffles and wider picotees. If you cross a parent with one of those characteristics to a parent that does not have the characteristic visibly then you should expect that the seedlings will have (on average) a much reduced characteristic, including sometimes, its absence. Expect to approximately halve the width of the teeth, ruffles, and picotees or worse when crossing one parent with and the other parent without those characteristics.

The same crossing scheme that can be used for flower size and other characteristics can be used with these characteristics as well.

Admmad thanks for your great insights. What about color let's say we are talking a single color daylily . Let's take an extreme where a near white is crossed with a near black, or a deep maroon with a pale yellow?

Maurice, I'm finally starting to understand you! Please give us advice about color!

Do not discount the part the grandparents play.

Flower colour is much more complex than the "quantitative" characteristics - those that can be easily measured (flower colours can also be measured with sophisticated equipment).

In tetraploids it becomes a little closer to the idea that the pigments tend to mix, but still not simply. In tetraploids a cross of a dark purple with a light purple may produce a range of flower colour in the seedlings from dark to light purples, but it can also produce somewhat unexpected colours (it depends on the flower colours of the ancestors). When the interest in crossing daylilies is in their flower colour it becomes more important to look at the flower colours not only of both of the parents but also of the grandparents and great grandparents and sometimes even several generations further back.
Generally crossing parents with the more or less the same flower colour will produce seedlings of a similar colour although in a range. That is generally a safe prediction with light coloured flowers. For example, if two light lavender coloured flowers are crossed their seedlings should have a range of lavender coloured flowers, but there might also be some light pinkish and some near whites. Plus there might be some darker than expected lavenders possibly as much as to be considered purples. How many such darker coloured flowers might be produced would depend on the intensity of the flower colour in the parents. But there can be surprises. It is possible, but not usually, that a cross of two light flower coloured daylilies produces seedlings with predominantly darker coloured flowers than their parents. That has happened in the past when one of the parents was a yellow-flowered daylily species and is not an entirely unexpected result.

The only rule I think was reasonable in the past was to not cross yellow flowered daylilies with purple/lavender flowered daylilies because the seedlings tended to have "muddy" brownish tones in their flowers. Even if that rule was simple and reasonably consistent in the past I don't think that it is any more. I think that there are now yellow and light yellow flowered daylilies that can be crossed to lavender and purple flowered daylilies and they do not produce strongly coloured "muddy" tones. Or tastes have changed and such tones are not considered as negatively as they were in the past.
Crossing a near-white flowered daylily with a lavender flowered daylily will sometimes produce some near-white flowered seedlings. Crossing some lavender flowered daylilies with each other will sometimes produce some near-white flowered seedlings.

Crossing a near-white with a near-black. It depends on the near-black and the near-white. Some near-whites may have yellowish tones, especially when the flower just opens in the morning or at night (and it is still relatively dark outside). Others may have light/faint lavender or pinkish tones. In each case the seedlings would be a range of flower colours based on the predominant flower colour of the near-black. The near-black might be a very deep red, a very deep purple or a very deep purple-red. Some of the seedling flower colours might have gray or brownish tinges.

Daylily flowers can have predominantly three ranges of pigments in their flowers. That makes their flower colours complex. There are yellow to orange carotenoid pigments (the same sort that are present in carrots and marigolds). There are lavender to blue-purple delphinidin pigments and red-purple cyanidin pigments. A daylily flower can have pigments from the three types in any mixture and in different amounts. So the range of flower colours is large. Some of the pigments do not work well with each other, for example carotenoids with delphinidins may produce the grayish brownish tones. Some of the pigments may not be made by some daylilies. Near-white and very light coloured flowers have little or no carotenoids, cyanidins or delphindins but they do have the light coloured or colourless building blocks for those pigments. Those building blocks have their own, sometimes very strong effects on flower pigments. Many daylily flowers have amounts of those building blocks in the eyezones of their flowers. Those, along with reduced and patterned amounts of the cyanidin and delphinidin pigments produce some of the patterned flowers.

gardenglory said:Do not discount the part the grandparents play.

Absolutely, Or even much further back, particularly in flower colour, but also in those characteristics that have an underlying mutation as the cause. Those would most likely be doubles, polymerous and cristates. Mutations can be carried but not shown for many generations before re-appearing.

I am going to use scape height for an example of some effects of the ancestry of a cross.
One daylily cross (A) the parents have scape heights of 14" and 34" - we expect their seedlings to average 24".
The other daylily cross (B) the parents have scape heights of 20" and 28" - we expect their seedlings to average 24".

We have a daylily with a scape height of 16" (C) and we would like to cross it with a taller daylily to get seedlings that are taller.

We have daylily A1 from the A cross and it has a height of 24" and we have daylily B1 from the B cross and it has a height of 24".

The cross of A1 with C produces seedlings (A1C) that average (16+24)/2 or 20" in height.
The cross of B1 with C produces seedlings (B1C) that average (16+24)/2 or 20" in height.

We expect that the seedlings from the two crosses will have about the same average heights. But there will be differences. We expect that the range of heights in the A1C seedlings will be greater than the range of heights in the B1C seedlings. As long as we produce reasonable (sufficient) numbers of seedlings we are likely to find some A1C seedlings that are taller than any of the B1C seedlings (and equally some A1C seedlings that are shorter than of the B1C seedlings). That is an effect of the differences in height of the grandparents.

Wow I think my head is spinning it's a lot for a novice to digest! So there is a great deal to think about if you are shooting for offspring to "look" a certain way. Thanks

@admmad Hi Maurice! Can you offer insight on foliage type? Say I cross a dormant with an evergreen, what resulting foliage type can I expect from the seedlings? Does a dormant + an evergreen make semi-evergreen? Does foliage type determine hardiness of a daylily? Is it true that most evergreen are not hardy?

@admmad

kousa said: Can you offer insight on foliage type? Say I cross a dormant with an evergreen, what resulting foliage type can I expect from the seedlings? Does a dormant + an evergreen make semi-evergreen? Does foliage type determine hardiness of a daylily? Is it true that most evergreen are not hardy?

@kousa
First question would be - diploids or tetraploids?

Stout worked with diploids; he indicated "evergreen" was "dominant." Theoretically that would mean that if you crossed a registered "dormant" with a registered "evergreen" the seedlings should be either 50% evergreen or 100% evergreen. It should also mean that crossing a registered "dormant" with a registered "dormant" should only produce 100% "dormant" seedlings.

Whether that was the case originally, when Stout made his crosses, is unknown. He published his results but he did not do enough crosses to validate his conclusions. We can examine the information in the AHS registration database to determine if Stout's conclusion is correct for diploids. In a sample of registered diploids with information about both parents there were 1846 registered diploids that were from "dormant" x "dormant" crosses. Of those 1508 were registered as "dormant", 61 were registered as "evergreen" and 277 were registered as "semi-evergreen". There should not have been any evergreen or semi-evergreen. Those numbers are 82% "dormant", 3% "evergreen" and 15% "semi-evergreen". We might assume that the 3% evergreen are misidentification but what are the 15% semi-evergreen?
In registered diploid daylilies with two registered parents, one of which was "dormant" and the other "evergreen" their registered offspring were 43% "dormant", 25% "evergreen" and 32% semi-evergreen.
The percentages do not fit any reasonable, simple inheritance rules. Part of the problem is that there should be no semi-evergreens - they should be "dormants" or "evergreens". So semi-evergreens, for a genetic analysis would have to be identified as to which ones were "evergreens" and which ones were "dormants". Genetically semi-evergreens should be reclassified. Most reasonably "semi-evergreens" are probably "dormants" that simply have leaves (perfectly normal and reasonable). In which case "dormant" x "dormant" gives 100% dormant (the 3% evergreen would be considered errors in classification) and that fits with Stout's suggestion. However "dormant" x evergreen (or vice versa evergreen x "dormant") should give 100% "evergreen" in some crosses and 50% "evergreen" and 50% "dormant" in other crosses. Ratios of 75% "dormant" and 25% evergreen do not fit. Combining the semi-evergreens with the evergreens to give 43% "dormant" and 57% evergreen contradicts the classification for the semi-evergreens in the "dormant" x "dormant" crosses.

Its difficult to decide what the genetic situation is, but you could use those percentages above for what to expect from "dormant" x "dormant" crosses and "evergreen" x "dormant" (or vice versa) crosses, at least for diploids.

I expect that most registered semi-evergreens are "dormant-capable" daylilies that have kept their leaves for longer.

Foliage type does not determine winter hardiness. However, where a daylily is hybridized and where its parents, grandparents, etc. were hybridized will have an effect on its hardiness. Daylilies hybridized in the south on average will not be as cold hardy as those hybridized in the north no matter what their foliage type (deciduous or evergreen). The more generations have been hybridized in the south without hybridizing with northern hybridized daylilies the less adapted to colder winters and the more adapted to milder winters the hybridizing populations will become. Their growth habit (dormant or evergrowing) will also not determine their winter hardiness.

When I purchase daylilies for my zone 4 location I do not even bother to look at the growth habit/foliage registered information. A daylily will either grow acceptably well here or it will not. Some hybridizer's daylilies may not do as well here as other hybridizer's daylilies.

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.

"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense."

Charley

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.

I have extracted some information for tetraploids from the registration database.

Tetraploids Dor x Dor produced 66% dor, 12% ev, 22% sev
Diploids Dor x Dor produced 82% dor, 3% ev, 15% sev

Tetraploids Ev x Ev produced 24% dor, 44% ev, 32% sev
Diploids Ev x Ev produced 13% dor, 63% ev, 24% sev

@admmad Again, such wonderful information, Maurice!

"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."

Wow, I am so glad that you wrote the above. I have been puzzling over my Undefinable's growth. I have to grow Undefinable indoors this winter on the advice of the seller because of its tenderness. Due to rust issue, I stripped it down to the nub when planted in the pot in mid September. The fan grew immediately and produced 10 leaves from Sept. to end of Dec. Since January, it has slowed down its growth significantly. Basically, it ceases putting out new leaf and some of the older leaves are starting to age. Eventhough it is indoors, it seems Undefinable which is an evergreen maybe undergoing dormancy? I was afraid that it was dying but the root and crown look healthy. Can I ask when do your indoor evergreens resume its growth or come out of dormancy?