DaylilyNut -- Seedling #03-07-18
(Click on either image for larger pictures)
This plant gets my "takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'" award. It's an amazing story of survival in the face of total neglect. As a small scale hybridizer, my mantra must be "focus, focus, focus." I'm always striving to resist the temptation to make out-of-focus crosses. And when I do make them I'll later discard the seeds, or neglect them after they've sprouted. That's what happened in this case. In 1996 I made a totally out of focus, just for fun cross, and had the time and energy to harvest the seeds, to label and refrigerate them, and even to germinate them. But in this case, I drew the line at lining them out. I did not have the time or energy or garden space to give to these little critters. Yet A decade later, this tough little bugger is still demanding my attention. Had I been Margo Reed or Jim Murphy, this baby would have bloomed first in 1998 and been ready for introduction five years ago. As it is, since it is far from having any usefulness in any of my hybridizing foci, it has remained on the back burner, and may not even be distinctive any longer.
Here's the rest of the story: Back in 1997 a dozen or so seedlings sprouted in the 4 1/4 inch pot you see in the picture at left. That's the way I started my seedlings for many years -- a whole cross crowded into a single little pot. After a month or two, I'd then line out the tiny things into the garden beds. But this particular pot of seedlings, along with dozens of others, was never planted -- I had germinated way too many seedlings and didn't have the time to line them out. But I didn't have the heart to just throw them away either. So these reject pots were left outside and out of the way, among weeds and trash at the edge of a garden fence with total neglect -- little or no watering, no winter protection, and no fertilizer. After two years growing in a few cubic inches of soil ravaged by total summer drying and -10F winter freezing without protection, some of these pots still had seedlings in them that refused to die! so I just kept them lying around, then in 1999 I took them with me to my new yard. (I had to clean up the old garden anyway, and a few tiny pots were as much trouble to discard as they were to throw in the back and haul to the new garden.) There they were in for more total neglect. The pots sat in a little clutch at an out-of-the-way edge of the new garden. So you can imagine my amazement when, in the summer of 2003, after six years of neglect, and with five surviving seedlings absurdly rootbound in this tiny pot, the strongest of the seedlings threw up a tall, robust scape and had the audacity to bloom!! The flower shown above at left is that maiden bloom. This is a sib, not the plant that produces polytepal flowers shown at the top, but this sib's refusal to be ignored is the only reason the polytepal seedling is with us today.
Once this tough little gal had forced herself upon me, I found time to line out all five seedlings and let them show me their stuff. And voila! One of these is producing consistent spidery polytepal blooms now every year. In fact the blooms often show a tendency to double, with a spidery protruding segment attached to an anther, as seen in the introductory picture at right at the top of the page. So if there's any distinction left here after all this delay, during which time spidery polytepals have begun showing up more and more often in gardens of the leading proponents of such things, well maybe I'll have to register it.
I think it's safe to say the plant is vigorous and hardy. The cross was the old spidery yellow double Hemerocallis 'Jo Barbre' pollenated by Reinke's spider H. 'Envy Me' which is from local Maryland hybridizer Bud Bennet's H. 'Country Charmer' and the classic H. 'Kindly Light'.
Frankly, with another garden move, this seedling has suffered more severe neglect. It survived our Maryland severe drought of 2007 in a 4 gallon pot without water all summer, going completely dormant during the worst of the hot dry conditions in late July. And I have not made a polytepal percentage count. It may be as low as 20% or as high as 60% polytepal. When I have statistics, they will appear here. Check back again.
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Pete Wetzel
P.O. Box 21
Eldersburg, MD 21784
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