Background history:

'Elizabeth Salter' is a semi-evergreen tetraploid introduced in 1990 by Salter.

It has earned the following AHS awards:
Stout Silver Medal: 2000
Award of Merit: 1998
Honorable Mention: 1995
JC: 1991

This plant can be found in our Plant Database at:
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Elizabeth Salter') .

Please join in, if you own this plant! We would love to know more! I award an acorn for performance information posted to this thread.



Also, please consider adding a Plant Performance Report to the database! Thank you!

Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Elizabeth Salter')

Love the flower on this one, it blooms well, despite not being ideal conditions-too much shade. The blooms always open nicely & look good.Often reblooms, hasn't multiplied a lot but I think that is because it is in too much shade.

I met "Elizabeth Salter" at the first daylily show I ever attended, happened in the small town of Bainbridge, GA. She positively glowed, I loved the self color - no distractions, and showed the delicate form to perfection. I had to have it, which set off the first of many daylily buying sprees over the last 10 years up here in the Tallahassee area. I had gone every year to one of the daylily farms in Alachua, FL when I lived down there for their open house and bought up to a half dozen plants but this was a show where the flowers were judged so they were staged to set off the flowers.

Mine arrived from Flourishing Daylilies and planted the same day. I impatiently waited for her to settle in and produce some flowers which she did. The scapes aren't real tall (about the listed height of 22") but they were over the foliage so the flowers showed nicely. Strangely, in spite of the formal description of the color as pink, the daylilies I've seen have been a soft and delicate salmon color, no trace of garishness or muddiness, just a pure feminine kind of color. The depth of color was sufficient so that I wouldn't call it a pastel but it wasn't bright either - just a restful shade and intensity. Joy's photo is closest to the color and form of my Elizabeth Salter.

This was in the days before major multibranching and multitudes of flowers per scape but it did bloom nicely over a fairly long period and then rebloomed for me. I suspect that if I hadn't planted that first set of daylilies in partial shade that I would have gotten more flowers. The foliage wasn't dense and the leaves were finely textured. I never noticed leaf streak or rust so it always looked clean. I have never tired of Elizabeth Salter and suspect I will always keep her. So pretty. She definitely deserved all of those awards.

Barb

alilyfan, I meant to mention the slow increase of my plant but like you, I think it was because of the excess shade from the 3 oak trees which limited the amount of sun it got. Mine had sun from daybreak until about 11am and from 3 or 4pm until about 7. That really isn't a lot of sun, all of it oblique.

I had this plant until last year, when I finally got rid of it. The straw that broke the camel's back here was that it finally got rust (some 10 years after rust first visited my garden), but I had been thinking about punting it before then.

The reasons? No rebloom (I will grant that it got a fair amount of shade, so that was at least part of the problem), and shorter scapes than I like. The blooms presented themselves above the foliage, but not by much. I have grown to want my daylily scapes much taller (at least for "large" flowered daylilies). Oh, and yes, the foliage was just a bit spiky.

As for the blooms themselves, the color seemed to vary depending on the time of day, sun versus shade, and maybe even from day to day. I am not sure that I would call it pink... maybe a peachy pink. When I first got it, I thought the color was fairly clear, but I have since seen clearer colors, so who knows. For its time, it was probably "ruffled" and maybe (or maybe it was just my imagination) it had a hint (just a hint) of a wire edge, but since then... more ruffles, bigger edges.

Bottom line, if you don't have to worry about rust, if you can give it full sun, and if you like short daylilies, then this might be a good daylily for you.

Some old images from my garden:

I truly like Elizabeth Salter. This is the 4th year in my garden and continues to gradually increase in size every year. She is not a fast increaser but I like it that way. The blooms are always the same, open well and meet the stats. The color is always consistent as to this picture. The number of blooms is decent but not a heavy bloomer. I can't remember bud count but I know she stops me in my garden walk abouts to admire her blooms. {I must be more observant of bud counts this year}. She is a keeper for me.
EDIT: SO, I have recorded her bud count this year {'19}, a disappointing 5 on 2 way branching. In spite of her beauty, I have to be diligent to catch it. There are others just as pretty so I need to replace this one {7 years here}

Elizabeth Salter has been here a few years. She was divided and sent to a friend. She has done well in the front garden with morning sun. Very unusual color.

Elizabeth Salter does well in my Zone 5 garden. It also did well when I lived in Maryland. It does bloom just above the foliage. When I lived in MD, it tended to be more melon in color (I attribute it to the clay soil). In NY, it has more pink showing. I also noticed the same with FAIRY TALE PINK. In MD it was melon in coloration. In NY, it was pink. I do not have any clay in my NY yard. Having grown Elizabeth Salter for about 20 years, it is still a keeper.

David

I planted Elizabeth Salter back on April 3rd 2015, it bloomed on my birthday May 17th 2015. It has done well here in my garden, forming a nice clump.
Here is a photo of it, already showing some nice scapes. Nearly all the plants in my garden are running a week or two ahead of past years because of the very mild winter we had. As can be seen in the photo, the scapes need to get quite a bit taller for the plant do look good and have the blooms get up above the foliage. I report back after the plant blooms this year.
I would say in my garden it has been an average performer, not a stand out, but also not a laggard.I hope to get scape height and bud count this year.

Lovely colour and texture but it always struggled here. It was not helped by it being a rust bucket. It was so frustrating trying to get it to multiply.
One day it just died.
Its offspring, Spacecoast Ruffles, is similar and does well here, however.