I have harvested over 100000 daylily seeds over the past 12 years and I have never come across white/cream seeds before. I wondered whether they would germinate so I tried both direct sowing and cold stratifying for a few weeks then bringing them out. The direct sowing has resulted in healthy seedlings emerging and the cold stratified seeds have now also germinated. Has anyone else had any seeds like this before? A couple more pods of similar seeds were also harvested. My 5000 plus clumps are all grown from seed and are unnamed hybrids and I do not keep records of the hand pollination that I do each year.
I live in South Africa and the seeds are from the current summer.

Some cultivars do produce viable white seeds. I know one I own does. Can't remember right now which one though.

'Moonlight Orchid' is one that is known to produce white seeds. It just means they are missing the phytomelanin encrustation of the seed coat that normal daylily seeds produce as they mature.

KeithB,
Welcome to the forum. Hoping to see more posts from you. Glad you got an answer.

I second what Sue said about Moonlight Orchid. It produces all-white, viable seeds. I have many seedlings from it. There are also daylilies that produce BROWN seeds. Honey, I Shrunk the Cat (Clement) always produces brown seeds. It is startling when you are used to seeing thousands of black seeds! Welcome to the forum, Keith

I've been involved with daylilies actively since about the early 1990's .... (Aware of them since the '70's when I 'stole' some 'Ditch Lilies' from an old abandoned farm site in Nova Scotia where we had a homestead.) .... What keeps me intrigued & hanging in there are the NEW aspects to this plant that surface every so often. I have seen here in my own seeds, some with a brownish cast to them, but assumed they were simply the result of immature development of some kind, even though the pods were appearing mature when picked. (Although it should have triggered a thought or two that specific genetics might be involved!) ... Have never seen - or even heard about - mature viable white seeds before this posting. I check this site pretty well each day to see what's new; what people are saying; etc. Keep it coming folks, keep it coming.

I have a seedling from this cross, PIERRE S. du PONT x CRYSTAL SMITH that produces only white seeds. I don't know if they are viable or not because I did not get to them in time. I find that these white seeds lose their viability faster than the black seeds. If you don't get to them when fresh, they will dry up and will not germinate.

Thanks for all the replies.
I just wonder which of the initial seed purchases from Lily Auction or EBay carried the genes, and why they appeared only on second or third generation crosses. The thrill of doing your own cross pollination!

To me it actually appears to be a defect, so I would want to try and stay away from anything that might produce white seeds.
Yet, in the world of hybridizers some might see it as a plus, would that lack of coating on the seed allow it to sprout quicker, could that be followed up by the creation of a daylily seed that sprouts in two days?

KeithB said: I just wonder which of the initial seed purchases from Lily Auction or EBay carried the genes, and why they appeared only on second or third generation crosses.

The most likely reason that white seeds only appeared on second or third generations crosses would be that the genetics of white seeds is recessive. It is also rare. So the few daylilies that have the gene (formally it is the allele) are heterozygous. The second part is that the outer seed layers are not determined by the seed but by the pod parent. So a genetically white seed w/w (for diploids) would usually be the normal black colour. A genetically w/w pod parent would produce white seeds when crossed with any pollen parent but in most cases all the white seeds would actually be genetically W/w.


The parents of such plants would usually be W/w and produce normal coloured black seeds. Those seeds produced by a cross of W/w X W/w would be 1/4 WW 1/2 Ww and 1/ww. But all those seeds would be black. Since the allele for white seeds is rare then heterozygous daylilies (W/w) are also rare. Your initial seeds purchases might have had only one W/w seed. Possibly there might have been one seed purchase that had more than one W/w seed. However, even when a cross is by chance W/w X W/w only one in four of the seeds produced can be expected to be w/w and produce white seeds when crossed with any pollen parent.
So you might have had more than one seed that produced a W/w plant. By chance it would have had to be crossed to another daylily that was also W/w (most likely from the same seed purchase but not necessarily). Since white seeds are almost certainly recessive it could by chance, take many generations of crosses until a W/w x W/w cross happened to produce a w/w plant and that w/w plant (which would have been a normal black seed) was used to produce new seeds.

The simplest case is that you purchased seeds that were W/w. Those would most likely have themselves produced some seeds that were W/w. At some time, by chance a cross was made in your garden of a W/w daylily with another W/w daylily. That cross produced a seedling that was w/w. The seed that produced that w/w plant would have been black. The w/w daylily when used as the pod parent will produce all white seeds from any cross. In the most likely case it would take two generations of crosses in your garden to produce white seeds. But it could take have taken many more generations since it is just by chance that a cross is made of W/w X W/w and that a w/w seedling was then used as a pod parent.

KeithB