Today I happened to see this daylily. It's supposed to be a proliferation of So Lovely, and is planted in our So Lovely border. However, to me, the flower is not So Lovely, and I don't understand how this could happen when we knew that this was a prolif of So Lovely. Please look at the pictures and give me ideas about this.


The flower had not quite opened so I helped it along and I was struck by how much it reminded me of Twirling Parasol. I usually have to tease open TP because it has trouble opening in the morning, probably because it is planted in a shady area. Even the bud on the unknown was shaped like a TP bud.


Bud of Twirling Parasol--see how it is pinched on the end, and I will gently work it open. I did this to the unknown flower.


So Lovely--the real flower and there is a definite difference between the two flowers.

So help me out, is this some sort of mutation, or what?

Looks like it could have some thrip issues, other than that not sure.

I will say I have planted proliffs in the past and they do fine for me, nothing weird at all. They do not produce an inferior plant in any way that I have noted.

I grew 'So Lovely' for years. It seldom looked like the photo you have labeled as a 'perfect' bloom.
The bloom you are questioning is not a mutation. You manually opened the bloom before it was ready.

The little bumps on the almost open bloom are caused by thrips.

This is a photo of SL in my garden,



Is there a possibility that the flower is mislabeled?

Thanks for the input and the answer is "no" about mislabeling. This one area is for So Lovely Only--we started with one plant and all the others are proliferations from the mother plant. The prolifs are also grown in a dedicated bed and then moved into the main bed as needed.




Please note that I did not use the term perfect for the flower I showed. It was about the norm for the blooms here--sometimes the petals roll back more than other times. Here is our first flower on June 10th and you can see it is somewhat different.

The flower colour is so close I would say it was a 'So Lovely' flower that went wrong somehow. There are more buds to open so that should show if it was an isolated problem to that particular bud.

Thanks, Sue, I will be watching for the next flowers as they come along. Maybe this is an anomaly, which would be the deviation from what one would expect from a So Lovely bloom.

Is this it's first year to bloom? Sometimes the first year they don't look that good, they take a couple years to do well.
I think it is SL and I don't think their is anything wrong with it, other than maybe a mild case of thrips and that is no big deal.
I'd just wait til next year and see then what it looks like.

Such a beautiful flower!

Although it is assumed that plants produced by proliferations are genetically identical to the parent plants that is not necessarily correct. Plants can have bud "sports". Bud sports are mutations. They may produce visible differences in some plant characteristic, or not.
In many garden plants bud sports produce many of the different cultivars. For example, at one time (of the survey) one quarter of named carnations had been produced by bud sports. Almost one third of named chrysanthemums were produced by bud sports. Almost three quarters of the florist/greenhouse roses had been produced by bud sports.

Daylilies do not show visible sports at high frequency but they can "sport" (have somatic mutations) .

Just to complete the picture.

Vegetatively propagated daylilies (dividing clumps) also does not necessarily produce genetically identical plants because of somatic mutations (sports) that accumulate with the passage of time (increase of fans).

Example:
I have one fan (a new daylily seedling).
I divide it into two separate fans when the fan increases.
I send one of those fans to a friend.
We both grow the plant for 20 years.
After those 20 years a geneticist takes one fan from me and one from my friend and compares them genetically. There will be differences.
If every few years I had divided my clump and replanted only the fan with the tallest scape then the geneticist will probably find that there are more differences. If I specifically choose to plant the fan that most resembles the original plant in as many characteristics as possible then there probably will be fewer differences.

One way a fan can be genetically different is if it was grown by seed, and not actually from off of the original clump. This could easily happen w/o a grower realizing as pods mature and drop into the clump and grow. I don't see any way possible that there could be any genetic difference between fans grown off of the same original fan. That just doesn't seem possible.

Frillylily said:I don't see any way possible that there could be any genetic difference between fans grown off of the same original fan. That just doesn't seem possible.

Mutations can occur every time a cell divides. A daylily begins as one cell. To become a flowering plant requires many cycles of growth, then division into two new daughter cells, followed by growth then division of each daughter cell into two new daughter cells for hundreds or perhaps thousands of divisions. At each division the probability that there will be a mutation is say about one in a million. However there are two copies of each of about 25,000 different genes. The total is about 50,000 genes in each cell. With a mutation rate of one in a million that means every 20 cells will have a new mutation. That means in a daylily plant with millions of different cells there are bound to be many cells with different new mutations. A new fan is created by a new growing point. At some point in time that new growing point was just one cell. If that cell had a mutation then the new fan has a new mutation that the other fans do not have. It happens in other ornamental plants - they are called bud sports.

How many cells an organism has, the mutation rate for that organism and how many cell divisions were required to produce those cells will determine how many genetically different cells that organism will have.

All the cells in our bodies are not necessarily completely genetically identical. The mutation rate for human cells (somatic mutation rate) has been estimated to be about 1 in a million for each cell division. The total number of cells in a human has been estimated to be 3.7 x 10 to the power 13

Only one hybridizer has recorded a bud sport in daylilies. 'Willy Nilly' is a bud sport of 'Willy'.
Willy has light pink flowers. Willy Nilly has light yellow flowers with an underlay of pink - actually it occasionally has streaks of pink in its flowers because its mutation is unstable.

It all makes sense now. This is why blooms in our gardens never look as good as the hybridizer's photos-- we aren't getting the same plant!

I think it has more to do with that we are not using the same photo editing software.

I think it also has more to do with -
we are not growing the plants
at the same temperatures,
with the same amounts of water,
with the same amounts of fertilizer,
dividing the plants so they are growing with the same amount of competition,
under the same day lengths,
for the same length of time during the growing seasons,
with the same winter temperatures and winter durations,

and then choosing the best flower on the best day to photograph.

Thanks, some really enlightening information here. I haven't had a chance to get out the past couple of days, other things taking up my time, and visit from relatives today kept me out of the garden. Maybe tomorrow I can check on the plant and see what is happening.