Hi Teresa,
Sorry it took so long to respond, but I really like this topic and wanted to review the latest Daylily Journal and do a nice job.
I am not by nature a popularity poll kind of guy. I'm disillusioned by how many of my favorite hybridizers don't have even one of their plants mentioned, even in their home zones which you would think would be showing some "home town" pride. So I'm not a fan of the popularity polls.
However, there are things for newer daylily addicts to learn from them. Some cultivars that you see over and over again should be mentioned. Webster's Pink Wonder, to me, seems to be a game changer for big UF flowers. For me, it's performance is much better than the registered performance, and if you go down its list of 118 children, I keep seeing kids that I already liked enough to buy, or are on my wishlist. It's almost like you could take any kind of daylily and cross it with WPW and get some kind of big, cool, UF blooms out of it. Same thing goes for White Eyes Pink Dragon (25 kids, also a WPW child) and Swallow Tail Kite (54 kids). When I see plants that continue to pile up kids, and I recognize a large percentage of the kids from looking at the LA and this site, I feel good about having those plants in my garden.
Rose F Kennedy is a Dip that has 134 kids. It was very popular for a Dip, when a lot of people thought Tets were the current popular ploidy. So popular, it was converted to a Tet and used so heavily by Tet hybridizers that 43% of those kids are Tets. Has there ever been anything like RFK, that has impacted the direction of hybridizers for both ploidies to that extent? I don't know, but I'm impressed and want that one in my garden.
And then All American Chief seems pretty popular for a 1994 introduction, especially in the north. That one is still on my "need to get" list.
