Make Your Own Daylily
Daylilies are a favorite garden perennial due to their beauty and brawn, and the choices are seemingly endless. The American Hemerocallis Society (www.daylilies.org) lists nearly 56,000 named varieties in its online registry, and hybridizers are forever creating new ones. For the pros, the business of creating and introducing new hybrids is an arduous, painstaking and expensive process. But crossing daylilies for fun is an easy activity for the home gardener. Because the flower parts are so large, the novice can handily accomplish the feat of transferring pollen grains from one daylily to the pistil (female reproductive organ) of another. Do this in early to mid morning—after pollen has dried a bit but before insects become active and beat you to the punch. If fertilization is successful, a green seedpod will form where the spent flower falls off. Watch the plant over the next month or more until the pods dry and split and the seeds are mature (they will be black). Let the seeds dry for about three days, then put them in the fridge until spring, when they can be planted. Plants may take one to three years to bloom. When choosing which daylilies to pair up, the good matchmaker has more than an eye for color and form. For daylily breeder Paul Owen of Slightly Different Nursery in Polkville, the dream marriage produces a plant with stems 30 to 34 inches tall with 20 to 30 blooms per scape and flowers 7 inches across. “It’s not just what the flower looks like—it’s the whole package,” he says. There’s one important rule in crossing daylilies, which have either one of two types of genetic profiles: diploid (“dips”) or tetraploid (“tets”). Dips can’t be successfully crossed with tets, and vice versa. If your daylilies are named, you can check the AHS registry to see what kind you have. If you’re not sure, just attempt your crosses anyway. If a seedpod doesn’t form, you’ll know the match was incompatible. Keep track of your crosses so you’ll remember how you achieved your creations. Owen uses phone wires for recordkeeping, twisting them around the stem and attaching a tag that lists the “pollen parent.” If you produce an offspring that you like, you’ll have to propagate it by division to increase your stock. The seeds of a hybrid daylily will not produce an identical plant.