Seedfork, the numbers are the votes that the plant got from people that grow them in region 14. Regional info. http://www.daylilies.org/AHSre...

I think I will go over to plant files and pull up a rust rating of evergreen and semi-evergreen daylilies and see how many come up on that list of popular ones in my area.

@admmad your post got cut off. You were just about to deal with leaves still growing while the scape does to the side.

This is excellent information for me. Glorious Autumn is listed as dormant. (All the following happened after the cockatoos destroyed the following plant). I noticed one plant subsequently only sent up one shoot which was a scape with leaves either side (L0R). When the scape died so did the leaves and I had no plant to see at all. I thought it snuffed it. Now, after 3 weeks, it has sent up two new shoots and is gunning it. This all happened in this December January, our summer.

(Now, if only the two plants that died in the heat wave in early January while I was absent would only shoot again. I stare at the spots they were every day looking).

I just send @admmad an email letting him know he got cut off

I am finding this forum very interesting. We are currently in a 5b zone (SW Ontario) and previously lived in a 5a zone. We haven't been 5b for long - this is our third and by far harshest winter, so I'll see what happened in a couple of months. However, we did experience winter loss of a few cultivars at our old house, and what is interesting is that they appear to be relatively mixed. We have about 250 cultivars, and have lost 6. Three are Evergreen, and three are semi-evergreen. Four were actually picked up in the Carolina/Florida areas, and two were local big box store tissue culture. At the time I bot the big box ones, I was ignorant about tissue culture, and have since stopped buying them. Not necessarily because of survival issues, but also because of stability issues. I have bot a total of six tissue culture plants - two have died, two have "morphed" over time into a plant that does not at all look like what was originally there, one appears to be doing just fine, and the last I've had for years, but it is extremely slow to multiply.

So I guess what I am saying is that I'm finding the habit issue a confusing one when considering winter survival, and I'm also saying that the tissue culture process might have an impact on winter hardiness.

Can anyone else comment?

Guybo,
I don't have much to add to your comments other than to say I hope others will join in with their experiences with their own daylilies and personal experiences like you have. I am afraid I am to new to all this to have taken the time to notice things like that, mainly because I was not even aware of them at the time I purchased my daylilies. Even in my early stage of growing daylilies, I have noticed that my purchases from Lowe's have not faired well in the long term, that is why I started this thread. I think so far two of the main reasons were the ones you have stated.

I unknowingly purchased some tissue cultured daylilies from a seller on ebay many years ago. When they bloomed they looked nothing like what they were supposed to. I contacted the seller and she told me she would have to contact her supplier. When she made that statement, I figured they were tissue cultured because she bought them in bulk and then resold them on ebay. She was a reputable seller that many people had purchased from and I was totally surprised that she would sell tissue cultured plants. I knew people that spoke of her highly. Her prices for the latest intros were always way lower than anybody elses so that should have been a warning sign to me.

Gleni & Guybo thank you for letting me know about the problem with my post. Apparently the character < that I used to represent a 'right' leaf and > for 'left' leaf are used in web html commands and that caused some of my post to become invisible. I have fixed the problem and the rest of the post has appeared.

Tissue Cultured Plants.

1. Many of the plants one buys are tissue cultured. For example, orchids in most stores. Many of the potato and strawberry plants used to produce our food begin life by being tissue cultured.

2. Problems can occur while tissue culturing and reputable companies grow out the plants they have produced to remove the occasional problem (rogue) plants.

When tissue-cultured daylilies began to appear and buyers complained that the plants were different I bought about a dozen or so tissue-cultured cultivars that I already had from normal clump divisions. I found only one significant difference. One cultivar bloomed with flowers that were completely different from the normal divisions. I continued to watch that tissue cultured plant and by about the sixth flower to open the plant had flowers that looked like they were supposed to. The original differences were so dramatic that I investigated the entire process of producing plants for sale in stores. It turns out that to sell the daylilies at normal planting time they are grown in greenhouses during the winter. Daylilies need strong sunlight (high intensity light) to develop their flower colours properly. Winter sunlight is not strong enough for daylilies to produce their normal flower colours. The plant that I watched had developed the first flowers to open in the weak sunlight of the winter and those buds did not receive enough stronger spring sunlight because they were in the store's shaded selling area. After a few weeks in the full sunlight of my garden the flowers that were opening had managed to develop their pigments properly and so finally looked normal.

The other major problem with store-bought plants is mislabelling (which can occur occasionally with specialist daylily growers). With a specialist daylily grower mislabelling happens to one plant of one cultivar at a time or to the entire clump of one cultivar. But in the supply chain for stores mislabelling can happen on the entire run of thousands of plants. Around about the same time as I was making my test buys of tissue-cultured daylilies my wife bought some daylilies from a local plant nursery. One of the plants was 'Edge of Darkness'. It is a purple. The plant bloomed orange. The nursery exchanged the plant the next year. The replacement plant bloomed orange. I contacted the company that produced the plant and they told me what had happened. When their field workers dug 'Edge of Darkness' they went to the wrong end of the field and dug the wrong rows of plants. The problem with 'Edge of Darkness' in the stores for several years was not that it was a tissue-cultured rogue but that it was a different cultivar.

I grew my tissue cultured plants for 2 summers. They never did bloom true. One was Spacecoast Starburst and the other was Startle.

admmad,
I was glad to hear that info about light and colors developing in tissue cultured plants, good to know that just because the first blooms are not the correct color it still has a chance.

Great information in this thread! ~Jan

Maurice, many thanks.
I have added new columns on my data recording sheets for all my clumps to track the scape types and plant behaviour over winter.

Gleni said:I have added new columns on my data recoding sheets for all my clumps to track the scape types and plant behaviour over winter.

OK., but daylilies can be quite unpredictable. In biological terms they would be described as having phenotypic plasticity - basically they can appear to be inconsistent. Or they can be very complicated.

Paradormancy is one characteristic that can be very complicated.

I have been growing most of my cultivars in a field. They have been quite neglected, but not completely so, for about ten years. They were not watered, not fertilized and seldom weeded. Those are approximately the conditions that daylily species face in their natural habitats and regions. I noticed that two of the cultivars were paradormant in the field. Those were 'Ophir' (O) and 'Heavenly Harmony' (HH). HH is an early bloomer for tetraploids and blooms in late June or early July here. Year after year it did not produce a single new leaf during the entire blooming season after its scape was visible in early June. Then after the scape dried and in September when its leaves started to age and yellow it would produce a few new short leaves and then the cold arrived and it would lose those leaves. Ophir blooms in mid-July here and it would usually not produce any new leaves once its scape appeared in late June. But in about one year out of three it would produce a few new leaves before it started blooming and then stop producing new leaves in mid-July. HH looked as if it was paradormant from early June always and Ophir looked as if it could be relied on to be paradormant but only from late July.

Then late one autumn I watered and ferilized HH. The next year it was not paradormant at all. It produced a scape in early June and continued to produce new leaves the entire summer. Then when those leaves finally aged and yellowed it sprouted a few short leaves which the cold then killed.

The next year I divided some of the Ophir and planted some single fans of it in a new bed. The single fans in the new bed received no extra water or fertilizer. Some untouched fans were left in the original bed. The new bed had been grass that was turned over so I would have to assume that it had some extra fertility and available nutrients. The next summer some of the single fans in the new bed bloomed. They were not paradormant. They continued to produce new leaves the entire summer. The untouched fans in the old bed were paradormant.

I have seen single clumps of one cultivar where there were fans that were paradormant and fans that were not.

It is reasonable for plants to show phenotypic plasticity - they are responding to their environment. Since they cannot get up and move to a better location they adapt and make the absolute best of the situation they find themselves in. When they are in poor conditions (no extra water, competition from other plants, no extra fertilizer) they grow the best they can but it will not be optimally or maximally. So they do not produce extra new leaves all summer - that might not be efficient or productive. However, when they have better conditions that allow them to make more growth then they do not become paradormant but grow throughout the summer.

When recording the growth characteristics of a cultivar one might have to record it separately for each fan and keep a record of the conditions (if those are likely to be different from year to year, etc).

I will be continuing my tests with Ophir this summer by giving some of the fans in the old bed extra water, weeding and fertilizer and seeing if changing the environment in the spring affects the growth/paradormancy this year (in the same year).

I do not know if there are any daylily cultivars (or species) that are consistently paradormant under all growing conditions that are reasonable in gardens (as opposed to those that are more or less natural conditions).