I felt the same way about yellow parent plants, but I do sometimes think they must pass the trait along more easily because so many sculpted relief plants had yellow parents. That is one reason I have avoided pleated and cristate plants, I am interested in relief so I believed I would be better off with just sculpted relief parents for at least one of the parents. But, I could be totally off base on both of those decisions.

I think I will try both - a friend has groovy guy in his garden and can help me along with pollen. Unfortunately here in Europe the newer/better relief cultivars are not available.

Seedfork said: I have found that the sculpted relief is seldom passed down with the crosses I have done.

I have not made any crosses for sculpted relief. However, the best bet for passing a characteristic to offspring is when you cross two individuals that both have the characteristic.
With some simply inherited characteristics crossing one parent with the characteristic to a daylily that does not have the characteristic will typically not produce any seedlings with the characteristic. That is the typically the situation when the parent without the characteristic has no ancestors that had the characteristic.
In other simply inherited characteristics crossing one parent with the characteristic to a daylily that does not have the characteristic will typically produce either 50% of the seedlings with the characteristic or 100%.
However, when the characteristic is not simply inherited then what happens is not easily predictable.
I do not expect that any of the sculpted forms are simply inherited because the characteristics are variable in their appearance even in plants that show the characteristic (formally called variable expressivity). I suspect that they also not always appear when they should (formally called incomplete penetrance).

I agree with all of the above, but I do keep making crosses with one parent without sculpted relief in their background hoping to get great bud counts and branching and beautiful foliage in the seedlings and then they should have some sculpted relief in their background so that down the road all my seedlings will end up with some sculpted relief in their backgrounds plus a lot of other great traits. Of course I cross my sculpted relief plants with other sculpted relief plants also, still not much success yet!

That is an interesting feedback for me :thankyou:
I will have to cross very late ones without relief with the frozen pollen of relief cultivars to get this trait into the end of the season. This means to me that I have to raise more seedlings as usual to see progress.

I've got one sculpted daylily, Wavelength. Sometimes it looks really angry and sometime it looks happy. Go figure! Anyway, I've had it for 7 years and this last year I crossed it with Voila Francois. The seedlings are looking great and I'm looking forward to the blooms! Here is Wavelength.

I like the way the coloring makes Wavelength look a bit like a dahlia.