Today's photos indicate that something mysterious has happened and is still happening with Flasher. I do not think this is a simple case of a dropped seed sprouting nor of a simple sport (mutation). This may be much more interesting and possibly important. To my knowledge something like this has happened once before in daylilies and produced the cultivars "Willy" and "Willy Nilly".
"Flasher" is normally the brownish red orange colour. It is a tetraploid. The parentage is below:
Flasher (Romine, 1979) height 24in (61cm), bloom 6in (15.0cm), season EM, Dormant, Tetraploid, Brownish red orange blend with orange throat. (Commandment × Paprika Velvet)
Commandment (Reckamp, 1968) height 30in (76cm), bloom 6.5in (16.5cm), season M, Rebloom, Dormant, Tetraploid, Bright pinkish orange blend with green throat. (Minted Gold × (Summer Splendor × Paris Gown))
Paprika Velvet (Hardy, 1969) height 24in (61cm), bloom 4.5in (11.5cm), season M, Dormant, Tetraploid, Paprika self . (Rocket City × Rocket City)
I assume that in today's blooms the two flowers are on different scapes and the two scapes are in two different fans.
To produce the yellowish flower there has to be a problem with the normal reddish pigment - it is not produced. That can be caused by an error during a flower's development (the pigment should have been produced but the error caused it not to be) or there is an error in the gene for the pigment so that it can typically it no longer could be produced. But clearly the pigment can still be produced at least in some locations or at some times during the flower's development. That suggests that this is a case of a new "jumping gene".
A "jumping gene"(or transposon) is a reasonably large piece of genetic material (DNA in this case) that can be removed and inserted (more or less at random) into different locations in the normal DNA (chromosomes) of the plant. When it is inserted it causes a mutation. In these pictures the mutations are shown by the yellow areas. When it is removed it returns the mutation, more or less, back to normal. In these pictures the normal areas are the reddish sections of the flowers.
As a flower develops in a bud a transposon may jump out of the gene at any time. Once it is out, it is difficult for it to get back into the same gene (this happens rarely). On flowers that have some yellowish areas and some reddish areas, the size of the reddish areas provides an estimate of when during that flower's development the transposon "jumped out". Large reddish sections mean early and small reddish sections mean late in flower development.
Fans that produce the yellowish flowers are a "sport" or (somatic) mutation of Flasher. The reddish areas on yellowish flowers are reversions to the expected colour. If you look up Augie's Unique Beauty (for example at
http://daylilydatabase.org/det... Unique Beauty) there is a picture of a cultivar that has something similar occurring (but there was no sport in that case - Augie's Unique Beauty probably has always had an active transposon).
The different flowers on Flasher can be on the same scape, but presumably the all yellowish flowers are on a different fan. If the fan continues to produce flowers that are unstable the plant could be introduced.
I should add that in the case of fans that produce the yellowish flowers these can revert back to producing only all-red flowers like their ancestor, Flasher. That is because in this case the yellowish flower mutation (or sport) is specifically of a sort that is unstable in a particular way. Most natural sports cannot revert back to the parental (previous) form (at noticeable frequencies, although theoretically every mutation can mutate a second time and by chance that second mutation can be the original form).
