Should daylillies be deadheaded?
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I don't know about 'should'; I usually do, just to give the next bud a chance to look its best.

Welcome to the site!

Wondering that also, looked through Google Scholar and could not find anything definitive. I would like to know if there has been any trials to see if if makes a difference in the health of plant, great question.

I think by deadheading you make the plant look better, but I do think it might help to avoid insect pests like snails, slugs and earwigs. I think if I posted a photo of any daylily before deadheading that has large blooms and makes a lot of them that bloom at one time, it would be obvious why most people deadhead. The problem is I have no photos of daylilies showing that mass of soggy blooms, because almost everyone deadheads before they take photos.

Sometimes what we do for aesthetics in gardening is not necessarily what the plant would prefer Studies have shown that daylilies recycle nutrients extracted from dying blooms to "re-use" for want of a better term. So depending how early you do it you will be inadvertently removing nutrition - whether this is at a level significant enough to have much of an impact on the plant I don't know, and gardening is often about trade-offs for appearance in any case. We do pretty much the same thing when we cut back living foliage for appearances sake.

Just my two cents, by deadheading, the plant continues to use its energy to produce flowers. When you dont deadhead, the plant's energy then shifts to making seeds. I learned this somewhere over the years, but I do see a difference in my garden. I just started taking photos of daylily blooms this year, so I deadhead everything every morning. I have noticed that all my flowering plants including daylilies have had a longer bloom period this year. My purple D'Oros have been blooming for over a month. Happy returns, first to bloom in my garden, I have seen some rebloom. I'm guessing where I didn't deadhead regularly prior, my reblooming daylilies never rebloomed. Although now, my problem is I have started dabbling pollen on some of the nicer varieties. Even though I have marked the bloom with a tag, I have mistakenly deadhead it.

Thanks to all, completely agree on the aesthetics and energy going toward seed production, still wondering by not deadheading and allowing seed production does the health of the plant suffer.

The health of the plant will not suffer by not deadheading and allowing seed production. That is what flowering is all about so it is normal. What will happen is that the plant will have less "food" that it can store because it will have been used for the seeds. What effect that will have on the plant depends on where it is being grown and how it is being grown. If it is fertilized well, watered well, temperatures are not too hot, there is not a lot of competition from other plants, it is not too large a clump and so on then the difference between deadheading and not deadheading may not be noticeable.
Most cultivated daylilies do not produce many seeds naturally. So deadheading most flowers will not usually remove many, if any, developing seeds because there may not be any. Some daylilies, such as the small-flowered rebloomers like 'Stela de Oro' do have seed pods naturally. So, to some extent, it depends on the actual daylilies. Diploid daylilies may set more natural pods than tetraploid daylilies theoretically but there is no objective information about that.
So if you have daylily plants that set a lot of pods naturally (visible after the dead flower drops off or dries and is removed) then deadheading the pods may be worthwhile.
Daylilies destroy their flowers on purpose. When they do so they scavenge material from the flowers to use for growing more flowers, for storing, and so on. If a flower has not set a pod then it is not making seeds. Removing those flowers too early as @Sooby indicated will be removing material that the plant could have used for new flowers, leaves, storage for use the next spring, etc.

Thanks, found this article about removing flowers and pods

https://journals.ashs.org/hort...

'Butterscotch Ruffles' and 'Happy Returns' are others that set pods "naturally" and deadheading is advantageous if you don't want a bunch of self/unknown cross seeds.

I wish I had taken a picture of one daylily this morning before I deadheaded it. Yesterday's bloom was covering today's bloom and was not allowing it to open. For that reason, a lot of times I live-head the night before so that doesn't happen. It's a chore that I don't relish, but am really glad the next day because it frees up my time so that I can get the earliest and best pictures of the blooms of the day before the pollinators have dusted the pollen all over the blooms... or at least I try to. I'm not always successful.

With that said though, this late in the season when there are fewer blooms, I usually dead-head as I go around and take pictures at the same time. The only ones that I leave are the bud-builders because I have broken off more new buds than I care to count trying to remove a spent bloom.

I tend to deadhead for many of the reasons given above... aesthetics, certainly, but also so the spent blooms don't smother the new buds and snag the opening flowers.

But this far north, I don't want the plants wasting energy on seed pods when that energy could be feeding the roots and helping to ensure survival over the next 5-month winter. We usually have 'lasting' snow on the ground here by mid to end of November, all of December, January, February, March and often into April... My gardens need to store enough energy, then hunker down for winter and still come back next year. (Good mulching and heavy snow cover do the rest.)

And when I deadhead, I drop the spent blooms back into the base of the plants right into the garden beds (beneath the foliage), where they just compost back into the soil, so hopefully the nutrients recycle themselves.

Depends on the day and blooms. Like others I deadhead for the aesthetics, unless I'm trying to set a pod. I'll leave the bloom alone til I know it has set or not.

And like Dianne, I drop spent blooms back into the garden. I leave leaf mulch from my pin oak all year, and any weeds pulled from the bed get used as mulch too.

Oh yes, definitely drop the spent blooms next to the plant and out of the way of my walkways. Those spent blooms are slippery, mushy things that can cause a fall hazard!

I have not noticed any depletion of nutrients due to deadheading, of course I feel any nutrients that were lost due to removing the blooms are more than made up for by all the organic mater, foliage spray, and granular fertilizer I add during the year. I do not put the blooms back at the base of the plant because I feel it encourages earwigs, slugs and snails.

I deadhead almost daily, for purely aesthetic reasons, and here's what I learned from the now-deceased Gretchen Harshbarger, Hemerocallis breeder, gardener, author of the McCall's Garden Book, and member of the Henry Field gardening family: "If you don't have your daylilies deadheaded by 6 a.m., you're not a real gardener." (So I'm not a real gardener, it seems, and if you're not a midwesterner, you may not know of Henry Field, a very old seed company that now does other things.)

Haha! I'm still drinking my morning coffee at 6am! I may wait until 8 or 9 am to deadhead if I haven't live headed the night before. And when I deadhead, I have to have a paper towel hanging from my pocket in order to wipe the daylily juices off my hands or I might wipe my hands on the wet grass. It's a messy job, so if I'm lucky I may not have to change clothes when I'm done! 👕

Daylily ooze is why I wear black in the mornings

And- yes, it will dye your previously lightened hair. I ended up actually dying blue and purple streaks into my hair for three years, inspired by the daylily stain I tried one summer…

My students loved having a teacher who was a lil bit different

Granzy said: "If you don't have your daylilies deadheaded by 6 a.m., you're not a real gardener."

That may have been adequate advice when it was first conceived, but most of the daylilies I consider worth their place in the garden are already open by 6, so I'd go with deadheading the night before. More than once I've found a prize flower with a spent bloom draped over it, gluing it shut.

I don't have time to live head. I carry a utility scissors around with me to snip the fading/dead flowers off (most of the time) before I take pictures in the morning. If I pollinate a flower I usually wait a couple days before I snip it off one and a half to two inches above the possible pod to clean things up.