@Xenacrockett
Hi Pat,
I am studying dormancy in daylilies and I hope I may ask you some questions about how daylilies act in your garden so that I can compare that with how they act in my zone 4 garden.
All plants are dormant when they are not growing. In the late autumn and winter in daylilies that means they are not making any new leaves. To make certain when we describe a daylily as dormant that we mean the same thing could you please explain what you mean when you describe a daylily as "pull up the covers and go to sleep"? and "they get active"?
All plants go dormant when the temperatures become too low for growing. But just as daylily cultivars have different size flowers and different size scapes they also have different temperatures that cause them to stop growing (go dormant). Some daylily cultivars may stop growing when the temperature is 41F or below while others may be able to grow at 41F. Some of those cultivars that can still grow at 41F may stop growing at 36F. Other cultivars may still be able to grow when the temperature is anything above 32F and so on.
Unfortunately there is a catch-22 to how plants grow as it becomes colder. Plants grow quickly at higher temperatures but they grow more and more slowly as the temperature gets lower. As an example, imagine if a daylily leaf grows one inch every day at 80F, then it might grow only one inch every two weeks (or perhaps take even longer than two weeks) at 40F. So the colder it is, the more difficult it becomes to be able to tell if a daylily is actually growing very slowly or not growing at all. It would be dormant only if it is not growing at all.
Daylily leaves often become yellow, age and die in the autumn. If a daylily cultivar does not grow any new leaves in the autumn (after its previous crop of leaves have died) we can assume that it is dormant then but we cannot know when it actually first became dormant. The yellowing of the leaves and finally their dying is different from being dormant. A daylily is dormant as soon as it is no longer making any new leaves. Some daylily cultivars stop making new leaves when the scape appears; other cultivars make new leaves until after the scape is visible but stop making new leaves after the last bud opens; some cultivars may stop making new leaves in late July or August or later and other cultivars may never stop making new leaves except when it is too cold.
