When I mean "bad foliage", I am not referring to blooms that are down in the foliage, or nearly so.
That I consider to be a fault of the scape, in that it is insufficiently high. But you make a good point, Bonnie, about the foliage outgrowing the class, and that seems like something that could be culled out prior to maiden bloom (which is the point of this entire exercise).
"Bad foliage" would be things like susceptibility to disease (in daylilies, susceptible to leaf streak or rust), problems early in the spring (spring sickness, not something I usually see here), or foliage that just for whatever reason looks bad.
In daylilies, I dislike really wide coarse foliage; I think it looks bad. (Can iris foliage get too wide? Or too skinny?) And foliage that does not arch properly but rather sticks straight up is definitely a fault. (I'm not sure what the iris equivalent to that last one would be - maybe foliage which always flops?)
Lucy, twisting or quickly browning foliage definitely sound like faults; thanks for pointing that out.
And not all plants perform well in all gardens, something to keep in mind. But first, they have to pass in the hybridizer's garden.
All that said, I know one kind of foliage culling which should be easy to do... in a cross aimed at variegated foliage, it presumably shouldn't take long to cull out the seedlings which
aren't variegated.
