Author: Korth

Our local daylily club – Bay Area Daylily Buds (BAD Buds) is hosting the Region 2 regional meeting in 2014.  I volunteered (again) to be chairman of the meeting.  Our club did this in 2004 and enjoyed it so we are doing it again. 

Luel and I considered introducing a flower that would have the same name as our theme for the regional meeting.  We hope to be able to grow enough to have every family attending get a fan as a gift plant.  We identified a seedling last year that was excellent quality.   It had 8 fans.  We hope to double it every year as follows:

2010 – 8 fans

2011 – 16 fans

2012 – 32 fans

2013 – 64 fans

2014 – 128 fans

This will be just about enough for most people to get a plant at our regional meeting.  If it grows faster, great.  Duane and Barbara Nickel from our Milwaukee connection are growing it for me and hopefully it will multiply faster way down south.  I kept one fan in garden and the scape looks great although it will not bloom for another 10 days or so.  The parentage is (August Wedding x JT Davis) x Heir to the Throne.  We counted 30 inches high, 24 buds, 5.5 inches in diameter.  Foliage is hard dormant.  Picture is below:

Bird of Prey (2011 introduction – Heavens Proclaim x (Monterrey Jack x Clarification) started blooming in the warm microclimate next to our house on the south side.  This is a much better garden plant than its parent – Heavens Proclaim.  Bird of Prey is taller, better branched, a hardy dormant, and more vigorous.   We will see our first seedlings from it this year but intend to hybridize with it again this year.  The picture does not do it justice – the flower is 7″ in size and quite showy as a clump. 

The pollen parent of Bird of Prey was a dormant seedling out of Monterrey Jack x Clarification.  The seedling flower was large but not fancy so we used it as a bridge plant.  In addition to Bird of Prey, we will likely introduce seedling 719-4 this  year which is Jamaican Love x (Monterrey Jack x Clarification).  Seedling 719-4 is also dormant with the same tall well branched scape.  I think the scapes are coming from the Monterrey Jack x Clarification seedling.  Photos of Bird of Prey, 719-4 and scapes from both are shown below.

Today was the real start of the daylily season for us.  We had our first seedlings open yesterday but today we had a seedling that was nice enough to mark as a keeper.  When we mark them, we give it a number, photograph the seedling, and put a flexible plastic around the scape with the number on it and the cross.  This years seedling crop will start with the number 100 so this first seedling is 100-1.  The pod parent is a seedling that first bloomeed in 2007 – that has a number of 715-1 ((Monterrey Jack x Cherokee Pass) x (Unending Melody x Sabine Baur)).  This is a nice dormant seedling but was not fancy enough to be a registration.  However, we expect several introductions out of it based on seedlings from last year and the large number of seedlings we will see this year.  Seedling 100-1 is (715-1 x New Paradigm).  We like the round form and fat sepals.

We also had an older named daylily bloom called Zoe Josephine.  It also is out of Monterrey Jack with Dan Mahony being the pod parent.  It has an especially nice edge on it. 

 

As of today – July 1, we have not had any plants that overwintered 2 years here bloom.  We did get some bloom from a new Florida plant (Ted’s Tribute to Linda) and from seedling 990-2 that was in the basement in 2009-2010.  Our basement plants typically do not bloom the summer after they bloomed in winter.  But we often get an early bloom the following year.  That is what happened with 990-2.  This seedling is a cross of Petit’s “April LaQuinta” by our 2011 introduction “Blown Away”.  It is a large polychrome and was lavishly ruffled the last couple days. 

We expect our first year seedlings to start this weekend and peak garden bloom in late July. 

Our northern hybridizing program focuses on breeding hardy plants that will survive winters here.  For us that means dormant foliage.  We often hear that dormant and hardy are not the same.  Our experience with northern dormant plants is that they are absolutely hardy.  Some evergreens are hardy here but many are not.  Some daylilies from down south are listed as dormant but do not perform as dormants here.   These have not all been hardy.  An example is Stamile’s Nordic Mist.  This plant was introduced a long time ago (1999) but I remembered buying it because it was dormant.  It never behaved as a dormant and died during one of our harsh winters.  I think that is why we hear people saying not all dormants are hardy.  We have never seen any hardiness issues with our own dormant plants. 

Luel and I check plant habit every spring.  Each numbered seedling is evaluated each spring.  We do this in April when the foliage is just emerging.  Most plants are easily identified as dormant or evergreen.  A few are somewhere in between and we will list them as semi-evergreen.  Even dormant plants behave differently.  August Bride goes completely underground and emerges in spring.  August Wedding always has one leaf that stays above ground but the new growth comes from a dormant bud under the ground.

Melanie Mason once told me that many plants are now difficult to tell if they are dormant or not.  I think she is right because of the genetics of evergreens and dormants are mixed together.  Regardless, we will continue to hybridize using one of our basic rules – “At least one parent should be dormant”. 

The photos below show 2010 seedlings we are evaluating.  Seedling 832-2 is a complex seedling involving Magic Amethyst, Tupac Amaru, Filled to Overflowing, and Heartbeat of Heaven.  The foliage is evergreen.  We crossed it with our 2011 dormant introduction – One Foundation.  Seedling 14-4 is listed as dormant and seedling 14-1 is listed as evergreen.  This is clear in the April photo but hard to distinguish in June.  Both plants are 3 fans but the dormant plant is a little more vigorous. 

Growing daylilies in northeast Wisconsin and shipping around the country is a constant challenge.  We started our business of selling our introductions in 2005.  That year we sold our first introductions  in late summer.  The plants were large and as big as the ones we got in spring from Florida.  However, most customers prefer their plants in spring. 

In 2006, we began shipping our introductions in spring.  We would select plants for introduction in the previous summer, divide the plants and line them out as single fans.  We shipped the largest plants we could but new introductions were often single fans. 

As our hybridizing program became more mature, we had more seedlings to select from for potential introduction.  In 2009, we lined out potential introductions in fall and evaluated them in 2010.  The plants we ended up introducing had many plants lined out to be large plants in spring 2011.  As a result, we were able to ship almost all of our introductions as double fans. 

In summer of 2010, we again lined out potential introductions.  With our high moisture spring, the plants are growing well and will be large plants when we select for introductions and get ready to ship in spring 2012. 

We are excited about sending out larger plants and our customers have indicated their pleasure with the plants we shipped this spring.  The photo below shows plants ready for shipment this spring.  Althout the foliage is immature, the roots are large and the daylilies should adapt well and be ready to grow well this year. 

As we move into early summer, we have looked back at a wild spring weather.  It began in late March with a 15 inch snow storm followed by a cold spell.  The snow melted in April along with more than 8.5 inches of precipitation (rain and snow combined).  We had water standing in areas that never had water before.  The weather was also cool and windy.

May was cool but normal precipitation.  June started nice but we got into another rainy spell with 9.0 inches of rain from June 15 through June 23.  Another stretch of standing water in the yard.   The temperatures in that period were in the 60’s for high temperatures.  We refused to put the heat on in the house even though it was quite cool.  Daylilies are way behind in bloom season but the wet weather should make them grow well.  Below are pictures from April snow storms and the result of June rains:

June 23 flooded garden bed.

April 3 snow cover

April 19 snow