Here's a long post - but with photos! Selma and I have been friends since she took up residence here.
When I acquire cultivars, I tend to search out if they have any descendants. There's no particular reason for doing that except I'm just curious about what they may have subsequently helped add to the daylily world. When I first searched on Selma, there weren't any. With an intro date of 1988, I figured her time was past and there wouldn't be any. Also, I don't recheck things except on a hit or miss basis.
The past couple of weeks I have been trying to rejuvenate and upgrade the pots of daylilies. One of the first choices was this Selma pod offspring using 'Milady Greensleeves' as the other parent. I liked this seedling a lot. I wish I could capture just how vivid the blooms were, but photography isn't ever going to be my strong suit.
Criteria for picking a seedling to upgrade isn't straightforward for me, but where I can I do gravitate toward those I simply liked and look forward to seeing again. Unfortunately some just have to wait a long time. This one appealed enough to me to make it early in the process guaranteeing it a break. But it made me think of all the other Selma kids, because I have liked the bloom on every one of them. They just have all appealed to me and I wondered why Selma didn't ever have any registered descendants. So I revisited the database and discovered there are now two!
I have only used Selma as the the pod parent. Nor have I seen every seedling bloom so there's still a chance for some mutts. But a couple of the following have also already made the cut to an upgrade. Not sure how many will, but probably at least a few more. For fun, I thought I'd post the photos along with the pollen parent.
Starting with four from 'Lllting Belle':
The last one here I called the 'crazy one'. Because of the varied bloom shapes and because the too short scapes grew zig-zagged. It grew in a 10" container hanging from a tree limb and had lots of increase and rebloomed twice. When I went to upgrade it this week to a larger container, I found rotting roots. I'm trying to salvage seven fans and tossed the rest. May have lost it. I was curious if having a more suitable container with a lot more growing room would cause it to grow better scapes, but may never know. Even if those fans survive, they will need some recovery time, I think.
Here's a couple from 'Skinwalker':
These two are known with garden names of Litter and Litter Mate due to the container they shared. I like the height and scape better on Litter, but like the bloom better on Litter Mate. They had distinct bloom seasons from each other. Litter was well finished blooming before Mate got started. I have put them in larger containers of nearly equal size, so I will be interested to see if that changes anything about their growth and bloom times. I propose to keep those containers paired together so they get as close to the same growing conditions as possible.
And last here are some 'Lillian's Vapor Trail' kids. Most of these are still trapped in a shallow, 10" plastic container. I counted 27 fans in it this week, so they survived the 0F temp for the most part. It's the problem with upgrades. I need 27 containers to get each their own space. A couple shown here are in larger containers already, but there were a couple of those that bloomed in that crowded little pot that I'd like to see out. Don't even know if those actually survived or not. Still, the variety was interesting.
That pale, icy pink one is trapped in the pot with numerous siblings. If I could only get one extracted, that would be the one. I'm not so much a pink aficionado as I am orange and yellow, but that one enchanted me.
That's enough of Selma's contribution to my plants. I'm happy to see she's got some out there available to the wider world and I hope someone enjoys them as much as I have been enjoying see her progeny bloom here.
Nearly everything here is beginning to put up growth. It appears I didn't lose any of the purchased cultivars and had a high rate of survival on the seedlings. Sort of a surprise on both, but especially on the seedlings. I had some small containers that essentially sat in water all winter. Some of those are growing instead of rotting. I didn't thin out the number of plants nearly as much as I expected. I'm still of the opinion that some of the daylilies are close to being swamp plants. It may depend on their specific genetics, but my hot, dry summers clearly are more lethal than the winters - even when they stay submerged in icy water.
. I, too, like Litter Mate and the icy pink one, but I am more partial to those colours. 
