Yes, agreed! I'm actually in the process of asking myself to what extent to I want to go to try and save her cultivars? I don't have a lot of space for daylilies (and I've completely blown my daylily budget and then some), so do I want to try to take on all of her daylilies, or just the Baby Keith?
As I expressed to my husband yesterday, the tragedy of losing cultivars goes beyond simply losing the genetics. Yesterday my husband tried saying 'why don't you just find out what the [cultivars' parents] were and re-create the daylilies that she made?' I had to explain that, from a genetic standpoint, it would be like a human having a kid who passes away and saying 'let's just have another kid exactly like the first and give it the same name.'
Beyond the genetics aspect, there is a certain responsibility that goes along with creating a daylily with a particular name...daylily names can only be registered ONCE. If someone creates a cultivar with a cool name, and then lets it go extinct, no one can ever have a daylily with that name ever again. (Not officially, anyway.) If we don't track down her "Black Stallion," for instance, all fans of the book "Black Stallion" that would want a daylily to honor their book passion are SOL.
So....that makes me want to rescue all of her cultivars, somehow.
