Hi all

This winter here in Italy is a bit more cold than the past two, it freezes regularly. The temps are between 32F and 19 F at night, we had some cold days in the range of 23F.

All the plants are green. I cut back foliage very brutally this year, there were a lot of pests including something similar to daylily rust (I know @sooby, you say this kind of rust doesnt exist here - btw, neither gall midge was supposed to be here but it was ), so I decided to give a good cut to everything.

The only daylily that really disappeared it's a seedling so I noted it and will see it it lives back in spring. Stella de Oro still have some green leaf and green scape (trimmed, as the others).

Why I don't see any difference in winter behaviour? The dormants are green as the SEvs and the EVs. Maybe this cold is not too cold?
Many thanks for reading!

As far as I remember I said rust had not been reported there, not that it couldn't exist there. For you to have daylily rust you would have had to purchase an infected plant from someone or some garden nearby would have had to have daylily rust. You can't just get it otherwise. I don't remember where the thread is but did we not check out some images and conclude it wasn't rust that you had? The gall midge is supposed to occur in Europe, it's been there since at least the late 1800s, didn't we eventually find a reference to its being in Italy?

Cutting back the foliage will not affect the gall midge because it winters over in the soil not the plant.

Registered foliage behaviour is determined in the garden of the hybridizer and doesn't necessarly behave the same way in other locations. As an opposite exampe to yours, daylilies of all foliage types are dormant and deciduous in my garden where it is much colder in winter than yours. Nineteen degrees F here would be a normal daytime high temperature at this time of year.

Thanks Sue, from the picture yes, we concluded with your help it wasn't rust, it happened I read a new discussion on here and I still find many details in common with what happened here. Daylilies rust it's not reported and all of my plants were free, but in the garden of my neighbour there's Fulva growing .

Gall midge wasn't reported in Italy. I reported it to some european groups and growers and no one gave much importance to this.
I know it survives to winter, I mentioned it just as an example of a pest not reported but existing and how it's still a mistery. I hope it won't show again because I cut every suspect bloom and destroyed everything. The plants affected were the ones near both fences on the sides of the house that is close to neighbours. But we don't speak to each other so I never asked.

I though this cold was enough to see some dormancy, the past two years we didn't go below 0 C and I thought every plant was still green because of that, evidence is then they need much cold to go dormant. It's not important for me, I was just curious about how much cold should it get to show dormancy!

For this year I decided to cut everything for a fresh new start. I want to see new leaves. Many thanks for your reply!

well, I went down to my garden and found plants in different stages of growth and dormancy even with no days in the teens. I looked at a few rows of plants and wrote down the names of all the ones I thought might be a dormant. Some looked very weak, pale and stressed, but some looked great(they were already showing fresh growth). So there were three types of plants I wrote down as being dormant, ones I couldn't see at all(only one-Primal Scream), several that looked like they were in dormancy, and then several showing clean new growth. I did guess correctly on Primal Scream. But I was not correct on all of the ones I thought were dormants, some were not. I also missed a few of the new growth plants I thought would be listed as dormants. 'Orange Velvet' ,'Janice Brown', and 'Woodside Amethyst' were Semi Evergreens but they all had new growth just like some of the dormants.
I did not check all the ones still showing a lot of green that I thought would be listed as evergreen, it is possible they were not all evergreen.

I too have been seeing different stages of growth on everything. I believe that the last cold snap we had may have stunted or slowed that resurgence on some. But with temps pushing above 70°f the next 5 days, they are sure to rebound.

cybersix said:find many details in common with what happened here. Daylilies rust it's not reported and all of my plants were free, but in the garden of my neighbour there's Fulva growing .

Gall midge wasn't reported in Italy. I reported it to some european groups and growers and no one gave much importance to this.
I know it survives to winter, I mentioned it just as an example of a pest not reported but existing and how it's still a mistery.

The fulva would have to be infected with rust for it to transfer to your garden. It's not a worldwide disease, so unless you buy an infected plant or someone in your neighbourhood buys an infected plant you won't have daylily rust (and if it is in Italy, whether recorded or not, it would have originated with someone who imported plants from the USA or Asia).

What I specifically meant about gall midge surviving winter was that it survives in the soil, so cutting back the foliage does not stop it from coming back the next year.

We did talk about the gall midge being in South Tyrol which is about two hours drive from you according to Google. This is the research article:

http://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Gred...

So it's not much of a surprise that you would have it there.

@sooby, Got it on rust.

We have a "general" rust that attacks many kind of plants with no preferences.
That's why I was wondering if my dayilies had "rust". It's one of the most common plant diseases.
Here's a link, in italian: http://www.giardinaggioweb.net...

For gall midge, I hope I caught all the infested buds. I placed a plastic bag under them and cut them with scissors so they could fall directly in the bag. I then put the bag in the non-recyclable waste containers. We can't burn anything in our properties, but that portion of waste gets burned by the city municipality to heat houses. The infected buds were few and doing so I hope I interrupted the life cycle. The mystery is because of the fact none of the fulva was affected and it's not the first year I have daylilies, but maybe gall midge it's not always around.

Cutting leaves almost to the ground has been a choice for trying to start from scratch again. Many leaves had lots of signs, aphids and spider mites were heavily present the past summer. Also there were snails living at the base of the plants and nests of earwigs.

A good cut and freezing temps maybe can help.

@seedfork - Larry, some of my plants are growing too. I will check better who's who, I simply can't stand the cold outside. It also snowed, not much but there's an inch of snow now.

@ganinfi, Stan, here it's still cold. I believe this year warm temps will arrive later than the past year. usually until march we don't have pleasant temps and plants don't grow much. It changes year by year.

Sabrina, there's no such thing as a general rust. I can't read all that article because it is in Italian but I did get a partial translation from a language conversion web site and what they are saying is that "rust" diseases affect many different plants, and they give examples of specific rusts, one was rose rust, one was chrysanthemum rust and so on which is correct. Each rust is specific to a limited number of plants, it doesn't mean that the same rust can affect many different plants. The only rust that affects daylilies is Puccinia hemerocallidis. There are lots of different rust species, in all there are around 7,000 different rusts as far as I remember.

I don't know when fulva flowers where you are but late-flowering daylilies are less affected by the gall midge than earlier flowering daylilies. It may be that the midges only just found your daylilies, or they have built up their numbers so slowly that you didn't notice, say, one mildly affected bud out of many. Or maybe you purchased a daylily with scapes or in a pot from someone who had gall midge.

Cutting leaves may help to some extent with some pests (but I can't think of any reason it would reduce the gall midge) but pests can still survive at the leaf bases and the cold you get there certainly won't stop spider mites or earwigs because we get those here where I am. Aphids also survive cold winters in North America.

Google translates the article very quickly! It does say the rust has no plant preferences, but that could be a bit of an over statement.

I had tried Google Translate but couldn't get it to work on the iPad so I used another translation site. The trouble is those translation sites often garble things, the one I used certainly did. But if you look at the beginning of the article they give examples of different rust fungus species, not even all the same genus. If you look up each of those rust species by its scientific name you'll find that each fungus is specific to very few plants. My guess is what they are trying to say is that most or all plants can get some kind of rust, but that doesn't mean they're all caused by the same fungus even if the symptoms and favourable environmental conditions for development are similar in many cases.

This is a bit off topic but does gall midge exist in the US? Gall midge sounds like a nightmare to deal with.

kousa said:This is a bit off topic but does gall midge exist in the US? Gall midge sounds like a nightmare to deal with.

Yes, at least in the Pacific NorthWest.

Here's the AHS Daylily Dictionary page for it:

http://www.daylilies.org/ahs_d...

Sue! I am so grateful to you for all the info that you provide on this forum and the Pest and Disease forum with your responses.

@sooby, there are many fungi with different names that causes rust. Surely each of them is specialized for a genus, or at least it seems so, so under the name of rust as symptoms they are defined.. As you know, I'm in the first years of growing dayililies (or better, anything living and green in a garden ). It's hard for me to learn because I get confused when I see a leaf that has yellow spots and pustules and then it turn brown and the spots are black.
I know you don't give much credit to the grower I buy daylilies from, but when I showed him the pictures he said rust. He said aphids arm the plants, they get weak and rust comes in. Every plant owner of any kind of plant in the garden sooner or later speaks about rust, that's why sometimes my mind crashes.
While I know that cutting leaves and cold it's not a remedy for gall midge I was hoping it could help with the rest but you are giving me little hope
All the plants I have came with no soil and no buds. Sure that pest found its way here.

When new foliage will grow I will try to be a diligent student and learn the most I can.
Thank you as always for the value of your posts!

Kousa, I'm glad you found the gall midge page useful.

Sabrina, gardeners sometimes use the term "rust" loosely to describe something with brown spots. True rust gets into the plants through the stomata, it does not need or use a wound from a pest like an aphid. There's a diagram of that on this page: http://web.ncf.ca/ah748/diagra...

Aphids do do damage that can be mistaken for rust. This is what it looks like:



Rusts do not need for a plant to be weakened before they can infect it.

The only rust species that affects daylilies is caused by the fungus Puccinia hemerocallidis. If that fungus is present in Italy you could get daylily rust. If it isn't then you can't. I did find a report that specifically said it is not present in Italy so if it is there the plant health people don't know about it or at least didn't when the report was written (I forgot to check the date)..

Sabrina, we've had a very mild winter to date. Only two or three days below freezing. With temp averaging around the upper 60s near 70 degree mark. The next few days will have the temps nearing mid 70s.

Good luck with you daylilys this season.

I went down and took a few photos just to show the different in how my plants are looking at this time of year.
1. Evergreen: One of the greenest plants left in the garden.
Gossip Girl

2. Semi Evergreen:
Freaky Good

3. Dormant:
Orchid Gilded Ruffles

There were only a couple of dormants where no plant was visible or just barely visible.
Primal Scream and Smoky Mountain Autumn.
Then I had some plants like these:
Evergreen:
Optical Delight

Azure Wings


Dormant: I have three clumps of South Seas and they all look like this.
South Seas

Mini Pearl

Victorian Princess:

Semi Evergreen
Janice Brown

Sue Rothbauer

Laura Harwood


So there is a lot of difference in how my plants are looking, but guessing which ones are registered as Evergreen, Dormant, or Semi Evergreen is not a sure bet!
Important to keep in mind most of these plants have been trimmed back, they would look a lot different if not trimmed like the photo of Victorian Princess, that is why I included that photo.
Victorian Princess Trimmed back. You can see the aphids now, I have to go spray!

@sooby - Sue, many thanks again. I think I have to train my eyes to recognize the little differences. When daylilies grow a lot and have many leaves I have some problem in checking them carefully. Then my usual panic starts and I doubt of everything I see!

@GaNinFl - Stan, I am envious of your mild winter. This year we are back to the freeze of 3-4 years ago. The latest winter were mild and I thought the climate had changed but it's not so, since we're freezing. Still, we are in a temperate zone and the lowest temp we have at night is 17F.

@Seedfork - Larry, many thanks for your photos. In my garden some SEv is putting new leaves and EV don't. The two dormants (Stella and Pardon me) are half and half: most part of the leaves is brown but there are green leaves and green scapes (cut almost to ground). You have to kill all of those aphids!

Today I moved some clumps of South Seas, Bali Watercolor, Laura Harwood, Crimson Pirate, and a NOID. Judging from the foliage you would have thought they were all evergreens, but 'South Seas' is listed as a dormant, Bali Watercolor is listed as an Evergreen, Laura Harwood is listed as a semi evergreen, and Crimson Pirate is listed as a
dormant, don't know about the NOID, but it certainly looked like an evergreen.

I don't know what minimum temps are needed for "dormant" daylilies to go dormant, nor for how long. With all of the daylily hybridization, I have to suspect that it really is cultivar specific.

I live in USDA Zone 9, where our lowest winter temp rarely gets to freezing, let alone below, and that is an overnight temp, not a daytime temp. (This past December and January, the lowest recorded nighttime temperatures for our city were 30-33 F (only a couple of nights got down to 30 F), but mostly above that.) So if dormant daylilies really needed a long period of cold weather to go dormant, you would think that none of them would go dormant here.

Yet I have some "dormant" daylilies that reliably go dormant (starting maybe in November?), in that you don't see any part of them above the ground until sometime after the middle of January. A few of these are 'Pink Fanfare', 'Mary's Gold', 'Madge Cayse' and 'Belle of Ashwood'. I have some Huben dormant cultivars, and I think that those have gone "below ground" too (well, more accurately, below the soil line in their pots ). I have other "dormant" daylilies that have probably also gone below ground... these ones are more visible to me (I'm not all over the garden during the colder months).

One thing that might factor in to all of this is that all of the above daylilies, excepting 'Pink Fanfare', get less than full sun. I don't know how or if that would play a role, generally speaking, in dormancy (or not); the small difference in daytime temperature (due to the added shade) doesn't seem like it should make much of a difference, if any.