Daylily Nut -- Seedling #05-BH
Possible future registration.
M Diu. nofr. Dor. dip. 23", 6", 2 branches, 7 buds (as a first year seedling). Palest lavender fading to white, light green throat. #03-WhiteL x #03-Vein
#03-WhiteL = (H. 'Floozy' (Wetzel, 2006) x #00-05-27)
#00-05-27 = [H. 'Oceanside' x (H. 'Grape Velvet' x H. 'Peppermint Stripe')]}.
#03-Vein = {[(H. 'Joan Senior' x H. 'Peppermint Stripe') x (H. 'Siloam Virginia Henson' x H. 'Janice Brown')] x H. 'Charleston Snow'}.
Seedling #05-BH. Fertile both ways.
"Whiter than white". This was my immediate, shocked impression of this amazing daylily upon seeing its first bloom on June 26, 2005. The simple distinction of #05-BH is that it appears whiter than the benchmark standard for daylily white, H. 'Gentle Shepherd'. In reality, there is a noticeable lavender coloration to the flower which starts out faint and fades even more as the flower matures through the day. It is not any more reflective then H. 'Gentle Shepherd', however to the human eye, it appears to stand out better. There is a whole science and industry surrounding the human perception of whiteness. For those interested, I've included my own essay on that subject below.
The gallery of pictures above shows thumbnails of the eight great-grandparents on the first row (note that the right-most seedling is not pictured -- the parents of H. 'Charleston Snow' are H. 'Gentle Shepherd' and an Allgood Seedling for which I have no picture. H. 'Charleston Snow' is the right-most of the four resultant grandparent flowers shown in the second row. My 2006 registration, H. 'Floozy', is the left-most grandparent. The two parent seedlings appear on the third row, beneath their parents (Pod parent always on the left). #05-BH appears at the bottom. Obviously there are a lot of lavender ancestors here. The intent of the cross that produced #05-BH was not to produce a white flower but one with a very clear white base color.
At left is the color comparison photo with H. 'Gentle Shepherd'. Note that #05-BH is a much larger flower with better form than GS. This adds to my excitement about the potential of this flower to advance the cause of whiteness in the daylily world.
Among the "flaws" or lesser qualities of #05-BH are its slowness to open in the morning. It still appears as a trumpet at 6AM in my garden. The flower is one of those that continues to grow and mature through the morning. With the growth comes the fading of the lavender color. Below are two companion photos to the color comparison shown above taken on the same day, using the same flowers. The photo above was taken around 6PM. The two photos below were taken at 9AM (left) and in full sun at noon (right).
The other weakness of the plant may be its foliage, which had some brown streaking at bloom time. The foliage recovered to a nice gray-green as fall progressed, however, so further evaluation of the foliage will be needed. The plant also appears somewhat slow to increase. As of the end of the 2005 growing season, it had produced only one small second fan. There was one good proliferation, which I successfully rooted. Unfortunately I later lost it due to neglect (I kept the rooted proliferation in stagnant warm water too long during the heat of the summer before taking the time to plant it, and by that time it had rotted). The second fan matured enough to send up two scapes in 2006. In early June 2007, a deer that somehow broke through my fence enclosure did significant damage to the three fans that were ready to bloom. This was not deer browse damage. Instead, the deer chose this place to lay down and rest, breaking off two of the three fans below the growth point of the crown, and damaging the third fan sufficiently that the scape didn't bloom. So I had no bloom in 2007; but by late season the surviving fan was recovering well and four new fans had emerged and grown to a size which ought to allow bloom in 2008.
The Science and Legerdemain of Whiteness: An Essay
(taken from a post to the AHS email Round Robin)
A new seedling bloomed for me a few days ago which shocked my senses. As I strolled my seedlings and first noticed it that morning, the sun was just peeking above the trees. It appeared to be the least yellow of any daylily I had ever seen ... by far! (the word "breakthrough" immediately sprang to mind). The color impression was of a voluptuous green throat surrounded by purest white ("whiter than white"). That was the case whether looking face-on, from the side, or at the backside of the flower.
Because my personal prime directive in hybridizing is to "get the yellow/melon out" of daylilies, I took notice.
What is remarkable is that this flower was not a pure near- white at all, but the palest of lavenders. It has multiple generations of my near-white breeding in its background, so the underlying color has been purged of as much yellow/melon as I am able to muster. That surely helped. But the faint lavender wash is what made the ultimate difference.
The science of whiteness is a seriously important commercial enterprise. Whiteness sells -- white teeth, white paper, white fabrics. So there have been countless commercial studies of how whiteness is judged by the human eye.
The normal human retina contains three kinds of color receptors (cones). [There is a rare mutation among some women, which gives them a fourth type of cone. I haven't been able to find specific information about the color sensitivity of this extra cone receptor.] But the three common receptors that most of us have are all sensitive to quite a broad range of light. Far from being optimally tuned to the standard primary colors, "red-green-blue", the three colors at which your cones have peak sensitivity are "blue-violet, green-yellow, and yellow-green". The latter two cones obviously have a pretty close spectral sensitivity to one another. That is because they only recently (on the evolutionary time scale) diverged from one another. The newest evolutionary advance, the yellow-green cone, *is* significantly more sensitive to red light. So our brains work their legerdemain, and allow us to adequately perceive red. This ability is only shared by humans and the highest old-world primates. It is said to have evolved in order to better distinguish/identify ripening fruit.
How does the color sensitivity of our three types of cones influence our perception of whiteness? As a seasoned research scientist, I'm taking the evidence and launching into my own hypothesis here. We have two types of cones which are highly yellow-sensitive, and one which is blue- violet sensitive.
Objective whiteness, as defined by scientific instrumental sensors, represents perfect 100% reflection in all wavelengths of light (all colors).
But subjective whiteness, as perceived by our three imperfect cone receptors, will saturate the two yellow- sensitive receptors and only one blue-violet sensitive receptor. Thus it will appear to us to be more yellow than it actually is.
So to compensate, subjective human perception/judgement has correctly given more weight to its blue-violet cones when evaluating whiteness.
It is an established fact, based on countless studies, that humans (in most cultures) will identify an object to be whitest if it reflects nearly 100% of blue/violet light but reflects notably less than 100% of yellow-green and green- yellow light. In other words, we have a sensor bias that leads us to identify faintly blue-violet hues as being more white than yellowish hues, ***even though*** the objective non-human sensors show that the more yellowish hues actually reflect more total light, and are therefore more (objectively) white.
There is another, purely environmental argument which might cause us to prefer objects that are more blue compared to objects that are more yellow.
Consider the natural objects with which we evolved, that appear white. The most abundant of them (to us) are clouds, snow, quartz rocks, the teeth in a human smile or a predator's snarl, and fresh plant fibers (flowers, tubers, fruits [think apple or banana], fresh-cut wood fibers [think paper], and raw materials for fabric [e.g. cotton]).
The sky is blue. So clouds are viewed through a not-quite transparent "haze" of blue-tinted light. Air molecules selectively scatter blue light more than red/yellow. (Trust me, I'm a research meteorologist
Clouds are among the only things in our environment that steadfastly hold their (blue/)white color. Snow cover accumulates dust and dirt which tend to reduce its whiteness with time. Dust and dirt tend to be yellowish or brownish (predominantly iron oxides and organics). Brilliant white pure quartz is also subject to being color-tainted by iron oxides, which turn it reddish/yellowish/brown. There aren't any compensating "bluing" agents. Teeth turn more yellow as they get stained by the various organic compounds that we eat. Plant fibers (apples, bananas, potatoes, paper, wood, cotton, senescing white flowers) all consistently turn more yellow/brown as they age.
The cumulative result of this environmental influence: I speculate that we attribute added "whiteness value" to those rare, special things that resist acquiring "yellowness" with the passage of time, most notably clouds, which have a blue cast because of the sky through which we view them.
So this enviromnental "bias toward things that reflect blue" is added to the physical bias that is built into our cone receptors, as discussed above.
Now back to daylilies. Rare (or even non-existent) is the daylily which does not possess some yellow coloration in some part of its bloom. I ask you take a step back and to try to gather an overall impression of your daylily beds (in peak bloom) viewed from a distance. Judge for yourself -- What color dominates? For me, without exception, in all the gardens I've seen in person or via a photograph, there is a dominant yellowness.
In the human quest for "whiteness", we seek to purge the yellowness. In fact we would hope to even exchange it for a "blue-violetness" which dims the overall reflectivity of the flower, but which is more pleasing to our eye.
The commercial interests, who seek to gain your favor by selling you things which you perceive as white, have long recognized this bias.
There are four important methods that are used to make things look more white:
The first is bleaching. Bleaching fabrics, paper or teeth happens to increase the reflectivity in the blue range more than it increases the reflectivity in the yellow range. This is the simplest first line of defense against yellowness.
The second is adding a blue colorant. Doing so actually *reduces* the overall reflectivity, particularly in the yellow range. But because of the human eye's bias, many, many objective preference studies have shown that humans will prefer objects which have been died subtly more blue as having more "whiteness" -- even though their reflectivity has been reduced. Many laundry detergents contain blue dye crystals (liquid detergents usually appear blue -- no accident!). The "blue-hair" ladies in your local daylily clubs have found this approach to work to their advantage.
The third is perhaps the most "honest" way to increase whiteness -- to inject pigments that actually reflect more light. The most successful of these is Titanium Dioxide (TiO2). My 84 year old father is a Chemical Engineer who worked in the pigments department at DuPont, Co. (researching newer and better paint colors). In the 1950's and early 60's he helped pioneer the use of TiO2 as a colorant. Titanium Dioxide has a greater reflectivity in visible and ultraviolet light than any other practical pigment. It continues to be widely used in many, many products ranging from energy efficient urban roofing to toothpaste.
But Titanium Dioxide strongly absorbs ultraviolet light. UV light is invisible to the eye, so your first response to this should be "so what?" But this is a critical fact when considering the fourth and most sophisticated method of increasing an object's perceived whiteness. That is the addition of fluorescent agents called "Optical Brighteners". These "dyes" also absorb ultraviolet light. But these special substances convert the ultraviolet to visible blue light which they then emit. The amazing result is that these dyes actually "reflect" more blue light than they receive! They essentially "glow in the dark" -- they have something like a 120% "reflectivity" in the blue end of the visible light spectrum.
In order to make your product the whitest it can be, you first bleach it, then you may want to add a blue colorant, and finally you add an optical brightener. In many applications, you don't want to also add TiO2 because it conflicts with the optical brightener by irreversibly absorbing the ultraviolet light rather than making it available to the flourescent optical brightener to be converted to visible blue light.
But back to daylilies once again. You can't bleach them. Until genetic engineering gets a lot more sophisticated, you can't add titanium dioxide and you can't add optical brighteners. But you can tint your whitest daylily with a blue-lavender wash. From my comparisons of this first year seedling with H. 'Gentle Shepherd' (which continues to be the whitest daylily on the planet), this seems to work. It probably reflects a tiny bit less light; but it is more pleasing. To me, it looks whiter, both when viewing it in person (direct sunlight or shade) and when viewing the digital photos taken under these different lighting conditions.
But I'm not getting too excited yet about any breakthrough. This first year seedling displayed rather ratty foliage -- lots of leaf streak. I had a bud count of 6, which I judge by comparison with other first year seedlings here as ordinary at best. There's just a "hint and a promise" of future glory here.
The DaylilyNut Farm has never had rust. It is state inspected, and is located about 25 miles west of Baltimore, MD. In 2006 the garden was moved to a cold-pocket valley, on the boundary between USDA climate zones 5 and 6 (coldest winter night is about -10F).
Return to Daylily Nut home page
Return to Introductions page
Return to Futures page
Pete Wetzel
P.O. Box 21
Eldersburg, MD 21784
Click to send me email at 
(or just type the address into your email address window)
Return to Introductions page
Return to Futures page
P.O. Box 21
Eldersburg, MD 21784
Click to send me email at
(or just type the address into your email address window)