I have a "little" story about this one. Back in the late 90's ( in my early days of collecting daylilies) I collected a lot of daylilies, including a large Munson collection, a Pauline Henry collection and had a bed consisting of all Pat Stamile's "candies." Around that time, tissue culturing of expensive daylilies was taking place in Europe ( mostly Holland) and selling them for a much lower price than the breeders was hitting the mass market. I had just bought EL DESPERADO from Iron Gate Gardens ( and paid $100 for it, the going rate at that time) and had also gotten RASPBERRY CANDY somewhere. The price was around $40,as it was still fairly new.
Imagine my chagrin to receive a catalog in the mail from Wayside Gardens about a week after I'd just purchased the $100 EL DESPERADO advertising EL DESPERADO $19.99. It was on their cover!!! And THEN the local big box stores began selling several daylilies that were selling for much more from daylily growers for $9.99. These were ALL the tissue cultured versions! So I ordered the TC version of EL DESPERADO because people were saying that the TC version was not the same and picked up a $9.99 version of RASPBERRY CANDY. I planted both of the TC versions right beside the "real thing" in the garden, wanting to see this for myself.
It took EL DESPERADO about 3 years before the TC version even bloomed. The plant that arrived was about the size of several proliferations I'm rooting in the kitchen window. When it did bloom, the plant was all wrong!! Height was wrong, ( TC much taller) eye was nowhere near as intense and blurry/ fuzzy/ not vivid like the REAL plant etc.
Same thing with RASPBERRY CANDY. I noticed the "real" version had a much more highly defined eye/ band and again, the scape height was completely incorrect. At the end of that season, I pulled both of the TC plants out and threw them on the compost pile.
Maybe a couple of years after that, Matthew Kaskel gave a talk about tissue culturing, because there had been a lot of criticism about it. I recall him stating that if done properly, TC could result in plants that did resemble the parent in all ways. What I wonder about ( fleetingly) at times is if some of these really bad imposter TC plants are still on the market. I visited the garden of a club member a few years after all this and she proudly displayed her clump of EL DESPERADO. I could tell immediately that it was the TC version and not the real plant ( but did not have the nerve to tell her.)
Regrettably, there are no images to document this - I did take pictures at the time, but it was long before digital and those long ago pictures were not saved on compute. Neither EL DESPERADO or RASPBERRY CANDY grow here now, although they were both good garden plants for years.
