Like Donald I'm a bit confused as to the companies/websites/plants involved here, but I find this interesting. I'm just going with the general understanding that there is a practice of re-naming cultivars and marketing them with only that changed name shown.
These companies are changing the daylily name to make a buck. They quite possibly put a lot of time and expense into good research about the bloom time and viability of particular daylilies in different climate zones, but if they just release that information with the
real daylily name, many if not most people will just buy the daylily from their favorite seller—and these companies don’t get the sale. The only way for them to get the sale is to make it look like the only way to get the daylilies is from them. So they change the name and then a daylily with that name can only be purchased from them.
I can still remember my mindset from just a year ago when I was a daylily newbie and at that time daylily names were irrelevant to me. The consumers these companies are marketing to and selling to are most likely similar. These consumers go to these websites or their local Home Cheapo, buy a couple daylilies, and put them in their landscape. Whether the name of the daylily is changed or inaccurate or not does not really hurt them.
But the story does not really end there. If these consumers get serious about daylilies and start to talk with others about daylilies they could end up in confusing situations. For example, they could think they are talking about two different plants when they are really talking about the same one. If they start hybridizing, a re-named daylily could become a problem as the parentage would be unknown.
The more significant issues involve what is “right”. The deception involved with marketing re-named daylilies certainly seems “wrong”. The more one understands the history of a particular plant, and its hybridizer, the more one will feel that changing its name is wrong. It would be right to think of the hybridizer who put in the time, money, and effort to develop the plant. It is only right that they get credit for their creation by having the correct name of the daylily to link back to them. The bottom-line seems to be that the practice of re-naming dayliies is just deceptive and wrong, and a business model based upon it is simply not a good one.
The only legitimate option these companies have is to get exclusive daylilies:
- Develop their own hybrids and patent them
- Purchase the rights to new cultivars and patent them
- Grow cultivars that are very good and yet quite rare and otherwise generally unavailable
