Why Daylily Foliage Matters To Me

Why Daylily Foliage Matters To Me:

Using Daylilies in the Landscape

The foliage of daylilies is an oft-neglected area and one that is ignored in some circles, but daylilies can have beautiful foliage and can serve wonderful effects in the garden; in background groupings, in mass plantings, as a substitute for ornamental grasses (with the added bonus of flowers) - but not just any daylily will work for these purposes. Some daylilies are bred for fancy flowers alone and require more intensive care than the average homeowner or gardener cares to spend on their gardens. 

My first  fifteen to twenty years with daylilies were spent mainly working with daylilies as landscape plantings rather than specimen plantings grown strictly for flowers. Though I grew a wide range of daylily types, I quickly found that only certain daylilies were actually what I would consider 'good plants', by which I mean landscape quality plants. To me, a landscape quality plant is a fast multiplier that recovers quickly from division and increases quickly but does not decrease its scape count as the plant matures and has beautiful foliage. Thus such plants can be frequently divided to create groupings and mass plantings that can be very beautiful in the landscape and can be accomplished fairly quickly, and without a massive monetary investment.

However, such plants are often overlooked in the daylily hobby and are not reliably-enough identified in the general home garden market. We often hear that daylilies make excellent ground covers, slope covers for erosion control, and xeriscaping plants, but not all daylilies successfully can fulfill those roles, which can make buying daylilies confusing and sometimes disappointing.

Over the years I have gravitated toward using simple flowered, species-form and more primitive cultivars in order to find just the right balance of vigor, flower display and beautiful foliage. However, in recent years, I have begun testing newer cultivars, both dips and tets, and have begun to locate a few that may have the extremely fine foliage and garden habit that can make a long-loved garden classic.

I wanted to show you some of the uses I have made of daylilies in my own landscape. As you can see, these daylily plantings are not just about the flower. They are important parts of my landscape year-round. The flower is an accent to the foliage, which is the primary landscape use for these plants. We frequently see short daylilies like Stella De Oro used in landscapes as borders or edging, but I like daylilies more as a backdrop and as a substitute for ornamental grasses. For that use, daylilies that are more robust in foliage and scapes are most appealing to me.

Here in the entry to my house, you can see a mass planting of daylilies to the left.

Here is a more complete view of the entry with daylilies in mass plantings to both the left and right of the stairs that lead down to the deck and house. You can see they have a lovely, grass-like, textural look that is very pleasing and is a wonderful contrast to the red foliage of the Japanese maple.

A study in contrast.

The contrast of the daylily foliage and the stark concrete retaining wall is very attractive and softens the hard edges of the concrete wall. The daylily growing behind the wall and to the left in front of the wall are H. fulva 'Korean', which tends to show lovely lime green foliage that is very golden when it first emerges in the spring.

From this view you can see that behind, the Japanese maple is trimmed flat and creates a hidden testing area where modern cultivars are being tested for their garden value. The soil in this area is backfill from when the house was built and is basically red sand and red clay. In other words - horrid! So this is a marvelous testing area for vigor and toughness. You can also see the large clump of H. Fulva 'Korean' that is against the retaining wall and you can see how golden it is. I believe that daylily foliage shows the same range of possibilities for color that hostas exhibit. Daylilies just haven't been selected for it like hostas have. The daylilies against the wall to the left of the fulva 'Korean' are the old classic Hyperion. You can see the lovely dark green foliage that it has from its ancestor H. citrina. I love the contrast of the two foliage colors together.

A closeup on Hyperion, and in the background you can see a mass planting that includes several species and cultivars. Notice that the planting is split in half with lime-foliaged plants to the right and darker green foliage plants to the left.

Here is a closeup on the mass planting I just mentioned above. I did plant the daylilies to have the two foliage colors as contrasts, but the ivy and sedum did their own thing and also intensify the contrast pf the daylily foliage. The daylilies to the left are the dreaded 'ditch lily', H. fulva 'Europa'. They have been there for years and haven't eaten creation :-) There is a clump of Stella or two in front of them also, and the daylilies to the left are a mixture of "Nashville Star" (an unregistered G. H. Wild cultivar that is slightly root-spreading), Frans Hals, H. sempervirens and H. fulva 'Kwanso'. When daylilies are mass planted like this, they tend to shade out most weeds. 

Here is the view from the bottom of the stairs of the daylilies on each side of the retaining wall. Notice how the golden spring foliage of fulva 'Korean' contrasts so beautifully with the Japanese maple and the faded red paint on the railing.

This view shows the area of the garden on the west side of the house. This pathway leads up to chicken houses (that no longer have any chickens...) and the west gardens and then up to the top of the hill where the hybridizing garden and grow-out beds are located. This pathway used to be full sun before the bamboo ate it. I grew many daylilies along that path until the bamboo took over. I now focus on Hosta and Hellebores in this area. The Japanese maples have done well in both full sun and heavy bamboo shade. Many of the daylilies that I am showing in this post once grew along this pathway and were rescued from under the bamboo. The bamboo killed several cultivars in this area, so those that survived tend to be extremely hardy and flourish. Now the last two winters have taken a serious toll on the bamboo. I hope in time it will recover, though we will probably need a few mild winters for that to happen, but that's gardening - everything you plant doesn't work and things evolve.

Here is the western side retaining wall and the bed behind it. Both sides of the house have mirror image beds - both have the same horrid soil and I use both as testing areas. Anything that flourishes in these beds is very hardy and thus very useful for many purposes. This garden on the side of the house is steeper, and this area just behind/against the retaining wall had problems with erosion. I did two things that have stopped that. First, I added a McCourt rectangular tub and filled that with Louisiana iris and used a small McCourt three-tier waterfall behind the tub and in it I am growing Iris versicolor. These stop the dirt from being washed down over the bank and into the bamboo. The second thing I did was to cover the steep bank with daylilies. These have filled in well and have worked to retain the soil and stop erosion. It is also really beautiful, lush and requires very little weeding.

Here is the bank when the daylilies were first added in early spring of 2011. You can see the terrible soil, These daylilies are rescues from under the bamboo. They are "Nashville Star" and a fulva like cultivar I bought at Lowes in 2000 that was simply called "ground cover daylily".  It is slightly root-spreading, which is very good on this slope. 

Here is "Nashville Star" blooming in the summer of 2011, only a few months after they were saved from under the bamboo. You can see how much those little single fans I had planted that spring had grown in only a few months.

Here is the same planting in the spring of 2012. You can see the great growth of these plants. I did not fertilize them at all, as the bamboo will run into any area and get very vigorous if there is much fertilizer added. So these plants have to be very vigorous to flourish in this awful soil. This is essential for daylilies that are going into landscape situations and that won't be pampered!

Here is the planting from above in the summer of 2012. You can see the fulvous types at the top of the planting and the Nashville Star plantings below. The hot pink flowers to the right are the old cultivar Carmine Monarch, and it too survived under the bamboo for many years before it was rescued.

Here is the planting this spring (2015). I actually moved some of the Nashville Star that was directly behind the tubs, as they weren't necessary for stopping erosion (the plants up higher seem to do that enough on their own) and they were crowding the irises. They are now in the entry planting.

Here is the planting in the winter. I included this picture to show that these are all dormants and why dormancy is important to me in this type of landscape setting - no 'boiled-lettuce', ragged leaves struggling to grow all winter... The dead daylily leaves and tree leaves work to stop erosion through the winter. The look of this bed is very clean and open all winter - a stark contrast to the lush look of the growing season. I really enjoy that contrast.

Here is the planting this spring from the back. I included this to show how the clumps along the edge of the slope have become huge and serve to stop most of the erosion on their own, by channeling the runoff away from the slope.

Here is a wider shot of the slope showing more of the garden that is behind it, mostly daylilies, but also a few peonies. Peonies take years to establish in this horrible soil, so there aren't many in this garden. The tree peony has been there for over twenty years. I extensively cull poor performing daylilies in this area, and you can see the results in beautiful plants, as well I am gathering data on what daylilies make excellent landscaping subjects.

And here is the full view of the western testing bed from the northern view. In addition to being a great place to test daylilies for vigor and resilience, it is also very pretty year-round. That is because I vigorously cull those cultivars with bad foliage and poor performance and I focus on those that perform beautifully and there are almost no semi-evergreens or evergreens here so the bed looks clean and neat all winter. The lushness of these beds on the sides of the house is beautiful and relaxing - a lovely place to relax in the late evening after a hard day of working in the rest of the garden, and it is not just beautiful when the daylilies bloom.

This is a view of my hybridizing garden and pigeon houses (formerly chicken houses...). This garden was established in 2010. Even though it is mostly daylilies here, I have still approached this planting as a garden and with an eye toward pleasing aesthetics. I am very influenced by Asian gardens, especially Japanese gardens, so an ocean of moving, variable greens to me is just as pleasing as when the garden is in full flower, and that is the garden that I see for much longer each year than the garden in flower. Since most of my property is on a south-facing slope, I like the effect of the daylily foliage as it appears to almost cascade down the hillsides. The lush, green effect is in part due to culling out anything that showed ugly, unattractive foliage. Look at the beautiful lushness of this scene and you can see why daylily foliage matters to me as much as the flowers.

Here is the hybridizing garden in 2011, just to show you the progression of this garden.

Here is a detailed shot of lovely foliage in the hybridizing garden. The daylily cultivar in the front of the picture is Substantial Evidence, which has beautiful golden to lime green foliage, while the taller clump behind it is Notify Ground Crew. Both cultivars have wonderful foliage, beautiful flowers and tons of presence in the garden.

Here is a picture from summer of 2012. You can see there are still a few cultivars with less-than-beautiful foliage hanging around at that time. 

Here is a view of the hybridizing garden this spring. I took the picture while standing on the porch of the pigeon house. You can see that the layout of the garden, even though it is just a garden for hybridizing, is still designed to be attractive, have easy access and be beautiful throughout the year. I am in this garden every day of the year, all year, as I have to feed the pigeons, so it maters to me that the garden is attractive and the plants that I grow here are beautiful, even when not in flower. The area to the front of the picture that is surrounded in landscaping timbers is a seedling bed. There is one plant in the front of the row against the timber to the right that has very unattractive foliage. I have seedlings from it, many with equally bad foliage, but a few with much better foliage. That plant is unlikely to be here after this season. The other seedlings around it have much better foliage and much better prospects.

Another shot of the hybridizing garden. The shot also shows some of the seedlings in their testing tubs. Notice even they have nice foliage. That's because I removed and composted those that didn't have beautiful foliage. I love the sea of beautiful green foliage in the background.

Here is Challenger looking gorgeous and shading the base of a beautiful white clematis. The plant in front of Challenger is one of the least attractive foliage plants left in the garden, but it has very strong rust resistance, so it has been given a reprieve for the time being, but as soon as I get some better seedlings from it...

The white clematis in bloom today. There is much more to the hybridizing gardens than just daylily flowers :-)

And to close our tour of foliage and mass plantings of daylilies, here we are back at the west retaining wall and the daylilies that stop the erosion. I have to admit, this is one of my very favorite areas in the garden - simple, elegant, and beautiful year round. This is why daylily foliage matters to me, and these are some of my methods for using daylilies in the landscape.

Advice For The Beginning Breeder

A Little Advice For The Beginning Breeder

**I want to start this post with a disclaimer. What I have to say in this post are my opinions based upon my own experiences. If these thoughts don't apply to you or you have other opinions then please ignore what I have to say. However, if you feel there is something in what I have to say that you can apply, please feel free to do so.**

In my many years of breeding plants and animals, I have gained some insight into the process of beginning a breeding program. I want to share some of these observations with you, the reader, so that you may avoid some of the pitfalls and old-wives-tales that are so common in many hobby realms.

One of the first observations I would like to make is about obtaining breeding stock. The standard story is invariably that you must buy the most expensive and advanced cultivars (plants)/strains/lines (animals) you can afford. In plants the implication is that you must get the latest and greatest introductions and in animals you should buy individuals of the highest placing show lines, if you even want to bother with breeding. However, I have two objections with this. The first is that many beginners may not have the experience to sink a large amount of money into the 'finest' stock and may not really be capable of giving these (often touchy or delicate) examples the care they may need. Conversely, the second point is that beginners may gain much more valuable experience by not working with "the best" (as if the best show lines or the 'latest and greatest' introductions actually even are "the best" either in terms of hardiness and survivability or genetic potential). I think the whole notion of 'buying the best' is sometimes more about the sellers purse than the buyers needs, in some instances.

A beginner to breeding any plant or animal is in need of experience. Once some experience is gained, then he or she will have a much better idea about what they want to do and actually can do. So my advice to the beginner is to buy older and affordable cultivars and gain some experience, or in animals buy the second tier stock usually called "breeding quality" and gain some experience. In poultry, an excellent source of stock to gain experience with are those obtained from the commercial hatcheries. Unfortunately, breeders of other animals don't really have this luxury. Plant breeders, though, are in the absolute best situation when it comes to purchasing stock. Any older cultivar that is still in commerce can generally be obtained fairly easily and often fairly inexpensively, and there are thousands to choose from in all forms, styles and both ploidy levels.

Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that an older cultivar is useless. No matter how many offspring were or were not produced from a given cultivar in the past, those breeders didn't have the same gene pool to choose from to combine with those cultivars that we have today. Gain some experience with older, less expensive cultivars that have traits you like and then in time you can bring in more expensive, newer cultivars as you gain experience and combine over the best of those older cultivars to learn about breeding, the making of bridge plants and the retrieving of desired traits in later generations.

Don't assume that because a cultivar is new or expensive that it is superior. Some may truly be superior plants, but others are merely fancier flowers. Like everyone else, I use the occasional fancy flower on a lesser plant in a breeding project, but I only combine them onto the hardiest and most vigorous plants, generally older things that I have a lot of experience with and can trust to reproduce those characteristics, even when crossed to weaker cultivars or seedlings. However, when you are new to breeding any type of plant or animal, you might not be able to recognize the truly hardy and vigorous nor the weak but fancy. The inexperienced eye can be deceived by flashy and extreme phenotype traits. So can more experienced breeders, sometimes, as well.

It is important to remember that delicate and hard to maintain does not equal quality. This is an old-wives-tale that seems to be far too common in all breeding groups. Quality starts with performance and may be compounded by phenotype extremes. However, an extreme or beautiful phenotype in and of itself does not imply quality. These things simply imply an accumulation of genes, usually major and minor, for the trait in question. That is nice, but does not imply a well rounded cultivar or strain. When you are starting out, it can be hard to recognize the more subtle performance traits through the glitz of the accumulated phenotype extremes.

In daylilies, it is important to remember that not all cultivars flourish in all environments. Some southern cultivars do not do well in cold climates. Some hard dormants don't survive in the south. This is just reality. However, most daylilies will do fairly well in most conditions. We haven't managed to turn them all into hothouse delicacies just yet. With that said, the beginner is best advised to buy from a climate similar to their own and even then, buy those that are flourishing in a similar climate. Just because something can survive in a given climate does not mean that it will also thrive. What you want to gain experience with at first are plants that thrive, because you want to reproduce plants that also thrive. 

There will be plenty of time to add "breeder plants" that may not thrive but are still useful in crossing over plants more suited to your environment in order to bring in advanced genes of one kind or another. Once you have some experience, you will also have a better chance of using such plants well. Starting with such plants can be discouraging, but even worse, you might think that such plants are the 'norm' and never gain discernment of what a great plant really is.

Beginners with any type of breeding project are rarely going to jump in and produce an enduring classic in their first batch of seeds, so don't feel pressured to buy very expensive or delicate stock from the get-go. Beginners are often poorly equipped to care for such stock and don't have a point of reference so may not recognize the problem traits in such lines and may actually compound those problems without realizing it. With experience you can learn to recognize the problems and work to eliminate them from such lines while working to combine the desired phenotype traits with desirable performance qualities.

It is so important to not get in a rush. There is no finish line in breeding. If you get started breeding anything and stick with it, you will always be breeding, selecting, working to improve both phenotype traits and performance traits. That's what breeding is. It doesn't end. There is no point at which anything is 'perfect'. There will always be room for improvement. Take your time in getting started and learn what good traits, on both phenotype and performance, really are. Don't let people convince you that poor performance traits are ok because a line or cultivar is 'so advanced' or 'so whatever'. You might use a weak individual, seedling or cultivar at times, but you should be working toward improving the line by eliminating the bad traits while retaining the desirable traits. The bad traits are not ok and should not be overlooked just because of x,y or z phenotype traits. Don't ever believe they are acceptable, even when you are using such an individual or paid a lot of money for it.

By starting with tried and true stock, stock that has proven to have many good traits over many years and in many locations over the country, you will learn what good traits are and then can recognize them. Once you know what real performance traits look like in your garden, it will be very hard for someone else to pull the wool over your eyes and convince you that something pretty but weak is 'superior'. The point of gaining experience is to have a point of reference for future endeavors. 

Remember that everyone will have opinions. Almost any system can bring success if the breeder follows through in what they are doing, but 'success' can mean different things. For some success means they made a lot of money. For others, success means that they have taken a phenotype and made it more extreme, more concentrated. For some success is the production of well-rounded strains or cultivars that are consistent in good traits and have both performance and phenotype extremes combined into one package.

Beware of the notion of not 'reinventing the wheel'. This is something I have heard a lot in the poultry world for many years. The animal world is somewhat different from the plant world in that the animals tend to come in set 'breeds', so the admonition to not reinvent the wheel for animal breeds usually has to do with not trying to make new breeds or new varieties of existing breeds, but in plant breeding, homozygous strains that reproduce themselves in clone-like fashion are the exception, not the rule. So I was a bit surprised to occasionally find this same admonition in the plant world. Doesn't every breeder reinvent the wheel in some way or another? Isn't that the whole point? If we aren't reinventing the wheel, what on earth are we doing? Just churning out more of the same, maybe with a little bit more of this or that trait? There does seem to be a lot of that in almost all breeding circles. 

Sometimes, though, the wheel needs to be reinvented. When there are problems in a line, sometimes it has to be outcrossed and remade from the ground up. So many people seem to fear doing this and so in too many domesticated organisms, we see a steady decline over generations through inbreeding and narrowing of the gene pool. In many animals lines, the fear of outcrossing produces inbreeding problems and creates lines that are not viable, often with disease susceptibility problems set in the line, as well as infertility. This is less of a problem in plants, but we do see some of it. One area where the wheel might desperately need to be reinvented in the daylily world is in regards to the many types that show high rust susceptibility.

Another worrisome trend I have noticed in the daylily world is the tendency to blame failure with a given cultivar on the person growing the plant. This is especially prevalent when dealing with evergreen and semi-evergreen cultivars that fail in the north. Instead of just saying that maybe that cultivar is not a good choice for all cold climate areas, some will blame the failure on 'cultural conditions'. We accept that many hard dormant cultivars won't survive in the south, so why then is it sometimes not also accepted that some evergreen cultivars won't survive in the north?

In regards to the notion that certain cultivars won't survive without specific cultural practices, my question is, why then would I want that cultivar when the six hundred cultivars I have that surrounded it in the garden all survived without those 'cultural practices'? A beginner may not think to ask that question, but having had many years of experience with growing and raising plants and animals, I have learned that delicacy doesn't equate rarity, value or specialness. 

Now, I might use a delicate or demanding specimen (for as long as it survives or for one or two seasons) in a breeding program, but I am not going to think that delicacy is ok. I recognize that such delicacy is a serious flaw and I will work to eliminate that problem in future generations while seeking to keep the desirable trait(s) from such a cultivar within the line. However, you have to be able to recognize the flaws in order to not perpetuate them. To do that, you have to be able to see those flaws and even understand that they are flaws to begin with. Only by gaining experience with excellent performing individuals or strains will you have that point of reference to recognize the flaws when you see them.

While it may not be a popular thing to say, there are plenty of five and ten dollar daylilies that are wonderful, beautiful garden plants and are also excellent breeders, especially when crossed to excellent modern cultivars. Age is not a determiner of breeding value. If you need any further evidence, just look at some of the work of Brian Mahieu or Gil Stelter, both of who have gone back to the species in their programs with wonderful results. Talk about reinventing the wheel. Can you reinvent it any more thoroughly than going back to the beginning?

Another fine example of someone who 'reinvented the wheel' is Richard Norris, who created his line of flat flowered cultivars by using the old, flat flowered cultivar Lights of Detroit. Lights of Detroit had been around for years when Richard started working with it to produce a flat flowered line, yet almost nothing of any interest had been done with it. Richard had both the vision and the persistence to just do it. He had an idea and a vision and raised large numbers over several generations to produce what he was looking for. There must be so many currently obscure traits in the daylily gene pool that could be, but currently aren't being, exploited to produce amazing and breathtaking new phenotypes. We will never know if someone doesn't try.

It is important for beginners to study what has gone before them. Look at what other did. Don't just play follow the leader or jump on every latest trend. Try new things, but also, don't be distressed if your ideas fail. Sometimes our failures are our greatest teachers. I am deeply grateful for my failures, sometimes more grateful for the failures than the successes. Learn to value your failures and your successes, as both are your teachers. Listen to the experiences of others, but follow your own ideas, dreams, intuitions and learn what is possible and what is not possible while mapping your own path. If you do, you might just give the world something extraordinary. Above all, be patient, take your time to learn and don't spend more than you can afford. There is always time for that when you know what you are doing and are sure of what you want to do.

Foliage Habits of Daylilies

Foliage Habits of Daylilies

Brian Reeder

Foliage habit is an interesting subject that I often spend a lot of time thinking about at this time of the year. I am in my garden every day, regardless of the cold or weather, as I have to feed and water my birds and that allows me to make observations of foliage type throughout the winter months.

An evergreen cultivar on the left and a true dormant cultivar on the right from my garden on 12/18/2014

To start this article, let’s look at how the AHS defines the foliage categories. From the AHS FAQ page we find the following:

What are the foliage traits of daylilies?

Foliage traits of daylilies include color, size, habit, and cold-hardiness and heat-tolerance.

Color

The foliage of daylilies can be blue-green to yellow-green or any shade in between.

Size

Daylily leaves vary considerably from slender and grass-like to husky, wide, and nearly corn-like. The leaves may arch, or may stand nearly erect. The length of daylily leaves ranges from as little as 6 inches to 36 inches or more.

Habit

The winter behavior of the daylily foliage is called "the foliage habit." For registration purposes, the foliage habit is loosely categorized as dormant, evergreen, and semi-evergreen.

• Dormant. The leaves of these daylilies die completely back as winter approaches. They stop growing and form resting buds at the crown, and the foliage dies down naturally and gradually. In the spring, the resting buds have a distinctive spear-like appearance as they emerge.
• Evergreen. These daylilies retain their leaves throughout the year. They do not form resting buds. Instead, they continually produce new leaves unless cold weather prevents growth. In mild climates, the leaves of evergreens remain green all winter. In the coldest climates, the foliage of evergreens nearly always is frozen back, but the crown survives if it is hardy (or well mulched).
• Semi-Evergreen. Today, the term semi-evergreen is used to describe any foliage behavior that is not readily classed as simple evergreen or dormant. Originally, the term semi-evergreen (or conversely, semi-dormant) was used to describe those daylilies that retained many of its leaves and appeared somewhat evergreen when grown in the South, but lost all its leaves and went dormant when grown in the North.

Cold-Hardiness and Heat-Tolerance

The cold-hardiness of daylilies is quite variable. Some are ironclad hardy. Others are extremely tender. Cold-hardiness is not determined by the foliage habit. Evergreen, dormant, and semi-evergreen can be anything from extremely cold hardy to extremely tender. To avoid risk of losing a cultivar, choose daylilies that others have already grown successfully in your climate.

 

I think this is a very good description of the three foliage habit registration categories. I agree with the definition of dormant and evergreen and I think the description of semi-evergreen is particularly good in that it acknowledges this category as basically a catchall for anything that is not a true dormant or extreme evergreen. Further, the difference between foliage type and cold hardiness is defined.

It is a common habit of humans to generalize, and so we often hear generalizations such as ‘all evergreens are tender’ or ‘all dormants are cold hardy’, but these generalizations are not always true. There are cold hardy evergreens and tender dormants. It is important to remember this. At this point, the genes of the original species are so blended and recombined that almost any combination is possible.

I would also point out that in truth the semi-evergreen category is something of a generalization. There really is no such thing as a ‘semi-evergreen’ speaking from a genetic standpoint, though I don’t blame the AHS for using the category. It is a convenient generalization that is useful for registry and can encompass all the in-betweens in one classification. The only problem I see with the classification is that a lot of people seem to think it is a real thing that is absolutely definable, rather than a broad category with a lot of variation.

On the left is a clump of Ancient Elf, a true, hard dormant photographed in my garden on 12/18/14. It almost appears that there is nothing there and if you dig through it, the resting buds are almost completely underground. On the right is the same clump in bloom summer 2014.

In truth, there are only two foliage habits - dormant or evergreen. Anything that does not go completely dormant in the winter is an evergreen, technically speaking, though the 'evergreen' range is very variable. However, as daylily cultivars are hybrids of several wild species of daylily, the genes of those species are recombined into unique combinations in the hybrids and expressions that are not seen in the species can occur.

Those cultivars that we call semi-evergreen are likely the expression of both evergreen and dormant genes interacting within the one genome. It is highly unlikely that single genes control all foliage habits amongst the species and so there are probably major genes and minor genes (or modifier genes) at work to create the foliage habit expressions we see in the species and their hybrid descendants. It is generally accepted that evergreen foliage habit is dominant to dormant foliage habit (likely the action of some of  the ‘major’ genes).

So a semi-evergreen may be a heterozygote for both types of major genes with evergreen habit predominating but not fully expressing (this could also be due to a dosage effect), or we may see some instances where a homozygote for evergreen also has one or more modifier genes coming from dormant ancestors and thus don’t express the evergreen genes fully. There are also likely combinations of both examples. As well, there are undoubtedly homozygous dormant cultivars that have some evergreen modifiers and so are something of a ’semi-dormant’, being far closer to a dormant than anything else, but not a real, true, hard dormant. These frequently (though not always) get registered as ‘dormant’.

A true evergreen seedling (Substantial Evidence x Kaleidoscopic Intrigue) in my garden photographed on 12/18/2014

However, to fully understand the foliage habit of daylilies, it is important to give some consideration to the species from which they all derive. There are dormant and evergreen species amongst the Hemerocallis genus. The dormant species are mainly true dormants that perfectly fit the description for dormant as per the AHS. An example of this type is H. dumortieri.

The evergreens however, are a different matter. They are much more variable, ranging from the tender and fully evergreen H. aurantiaca and its clone Major to the group that I would consider ‘conditional evergreens’ such as the many clones of H. fulva, H. citrina. In these later species the foliage is usually evergreen in warm winter climates while going dormant in cold winter climates. It is also interesting to note the AHS description of semi-evergreen says this type of habit was the old definition of semi-evergreen. A few clones of some of the species can actually maintain evergreen foliage while forming a resting bud in cold climates. The fulva clone Chengtu is an example. 

Even in Stout's day, when they were only dealing with species and the very earliest diploid hybrids, it was noted that some of the evergreen species could not survive in the north, or did very poorly.

From Daylilies by A. B. Stout 1934, regarding Winter Injury on page 99 of the 1986 edition - "In the northern part of the United States and further north daylilies which have evergreen habit of growth usually suffer to some extent from winter injury...In the region about New York there is usually a protection of snow for only a small part of the winter and there is an alternation of freezing and thawing temperatures. When spring arrives many of the exposed leaves have been killed and some buds may be dead... The H. aurantiaca clone Major suffers so severely from winter injury that is usually does not survive the winter throughout the northern United States. Many seedlings obtained by hybridizing H aurantiaca and (its clone) Major with more hardy daylilies are not fully hardy."

On page 100 in the section 'In semi-tropical and tropical countries', he states, "In the southern states the types and varieties which are evergreen or nearly so, are said to be most satisfactory."

So from the very beginning, there was a noticeable difference in the most hardy, dormant species and the most tender of the evergreen species, with some evergreen species being impossible or nearly impossible to grown in the north. This is just a fact of the evolution of the species in their native ranges in Asia. We can't expect that all evergreen cultivars, descending from those semi-tropical evergreen species, are going to suddenly 'get hardy'. Some evergreen cultivars are very hardy, and probably due to cold hardy dormant species deep in their ancestries or from the presence of hardy types of evergreens such as H. fulva or H. citrina in their background. Others are not hardy and that has a lot to do with the genes they have inherited from tender evergreen species in their backgrounds.

Because there are different variations of evergreen foliage habit amongst the species, as well as the true dormants, and crossing these species widely made the hybrid cultivars, we have an even wider array of foliage habit expression in the hybrids than we do in the species. Some of our cultivars perform exactly as the species do in regards to foliage habit, but some fall in-between their species ancestors.

Foliage habit, in and of itself, does not touch directly on the subject of cold hardiness, as the AHS text above points out very well. Cold hardiness seems to be determined by genes other than those that determine the foliage habit, though those genes would also derive from the wild species in the ancestry of the hybrids. While it is true that there are hardy evergreen cultivars, it is also true that some evergreen cultivars will not perform at their maximum capacity in areas of cold weather due to the stress they must endure through the cold months of winter, even though they survive from year to year and bloom. An example of such suppressed performance would be reduced branching and bud counts or scape heights. There are however some evergreen cultivars that simply won’t survive in northern climates.

In my own experience with around 800 cultivars, I have only lost a tiny handful of evergreen cultivars outright to cold. What I see more frequently is suppressed performance, occasional loss of a few fans, reduced branching, bud counts and scape height. Because I am in an area that can be very cold or very warm in the winter, each year can be variable. However, my area almost never has the snow cover that more northern areas benefit from and so some evergreen cultivars are hardier both further north and further south than they are in my Kentucky garden. This can come as quite a surprise to folks not familiar with our variable winter weather and late, often devastating frosts.

A particularly bad combination here is cultivars that are evergreen and are early-early blooming. We frequently have late frosts, but we may get very warm as early as March and have full growth very early with scapes beginning to form on the earliest flowering cultivars by the beginning of May. When those late April and early to mid May hard frosts occur, this causes considerable damage to those early blooming evergreens and the entire first round of scapes may be completely destroyed or severally damaged. When those cultivars are also rebloomers, then the later bloom scapes will be fine, but for those first ones these late frosts are a disaster. There are very few years when we don’t have an episode of late frosts, so this damage is something I see almost every year. I do want to stress though that this does not mean these are ‘bad’ plants. I fully understand why the early-early evergreen cultivars are very desirable in more southern settings. They just aren’t the most suitable cultivars for my climate. In spite of that, I am still using some of these, especially strong rebloomers, in my breeding program. I am just careful about what I cross them with.

With that said, though, I want to stress that I buy and grow evergreens, usually bred in the deep south, making them a part of my breeding program and fully intend to keep growing them and breeding from them. While I personally prefer hard dormant cultivars, I want to produce plants that can be grown successfully in climates other than my own, both north and south. Another thing I keep in the back of my mind is that one can never tell how the climate may change over time and should we become warmer and warmer, hard dormants may start to be less viable here than the more evergreen cultivars. No one can know what will happen, and I certainly don’t claim to know, but I like to be prepared for all eventualities. Another thing that I take into consideration is that there is generally more information on the rust resistance of plants bred in the south than there is for plants bred in the north.

In my own garden there are very successful evergreens. I have grown Nivia Guest, for example, for over twenty years and it has never shown any problems. I would also point out that it is not a very early blooming cultivar, so I think this helps make it more successful as a garden flower, but the plant never reduces in fan count here in even the coldest winters. Other evergreens don’t do as well, and a few do really poorly, decreasing every year and showing infrequent bloom scapes only after the very mildest winters. However, some of these are still a part of my breeding program, even if only in a very limited way.

There are many reasons to use these cultivars. The southern breeders can go through their generations much faster than most of us in the north can (except perhaps where greenhouses are used in the north), and so the southern breeders are almost always ahead of everyone else in terms of flower trait advancements. Those advanced flower genetics are reason enough alone, but there are also other reasons. For me, the known rust resistance of some cultivars from the south is a huge necessity, as most northern growers can’t test for rust resistance so the results of their programs are far too often an unknown quantity. Finally, using the southern evergreens over northern dormants can often produce both foliage types, as well as the in-betweens so plants can be produced that may flourish in the south or in the north, and sometimes you get lucky and get a plant that flourishes in both extremes. Using the southern evergreens over northern dormants is a long-practiced, tried-and-true method. Just look to Curt Hanson’s amazing program if you need an example.

I have some evergreens here that survive (though certainly don’t flourish) and set seeds well, but their seedlings have very poor survivability through the winter in my environment. Those few that make it through though are often well worth the effort and usually continue to show hardiness. A technique I have found that is giving me some success is to use the pollen of these more tender evergreens on hard dormants that are very cold hardy to produce seedlings that seem to survive more frequently. Often all the seedlings are somewhere in the semi-evergreen category, but they may be more hardy and can often throw dormant offspring when backcrossed to other dormants.

I have no peer reviewed proof on this technique, and so far this is only my anecdotal experience, but it seems that when I take one of these more tender cultivar's pollen over a very hardy dormant as pod parent, I get better survival rates in the seedlings than I do if I make the reverse (reciprocal) cross. This may not prove to be true in all cases, but so far, this seems to be the most successful route in getting hardier seedlings from these more tender cultivars in my breeding program.

Now I want to turn to another aspect of foliage type. It is important to remember, especially for beginners, that all plants registered as a given foliage type may not always be that foliage type. Sometimes it is that a cultivar performs differently in your garden than it did in the hybridizer’s garden. Sometimes a seedling gets labeled wrong or information gets mixed up in the registration process. I don’t like to think that anyone is intentionally falsifying foliage habit for whatever advantage they may assume they get from doing that, but it is not outside the realm of possibility I suppose. I never assume that is the case though as I always give people the benefit of the doubt.

An interesting example - the cultivar on the right is a registered dormant, while the cultivar in the center is a registered semi-evergreen and the cultivar on the left is a registered evergreen. Can you tell any significant difference between any of them? I can't either... To me, these are all three in the 'semi-evergreen' category, with none being true dormants or true evergreens in my garden.

It is important to remember that there are species that are evergreen in warm winters and dormant in cold winters, and there are cultivars that perform in the same manner. When this happens, it is usually a happy surprise for all concerned, as such a plant registered as dormant by a northern breeder may prove to be evergreen in the south and vice-versa. More often it occurs that plants registered as semi-evergreen or evergreen by a southern breeder may turn out to go dormant when grown in the north. Both Linda Sierra and Priscilla’s Rainbow are examples of semi-evergreen and evergreen cultivars that go dormant in the north.

Priscilla's Rainbow - a registered evergreen that, as you can clearly see, goes dormant in my garden. This one is well known to go dormant in cold climates, but remains evergreen in warm climates. It has very tight resting buds that are mostly underground throughout the winter.

Another registered evergreen that goes dormant in colder climates, Challenger is a Stout cultivar from 1949 that is a blending of H. altissima and H. fulva, both of which show this type of foliage habit being evergreen in warm climates and dormant in cold climates.

What can be less exciting and desirable is when you purchase a ‘dormant’ only to have it prove to be some form of evergreen/semi-evergreen in your garden, if you really wanted a dormant (and I can assume the opposite would be true if you wanted an evergreen, but got a dormant instead). I have heard discussion that there are two types of dormancy - one is alleged to be temperature-triggered dormancy and the other is alleged to be light-triggered dormancy. If this is the case (and there is no solid proof that I know of that it is), perhaps the triggers for dormancy are very different in various areas and so something that goes dormant in one area may not get the right trigger to go dormant in another area. I can’t say, but I don’t want to think people are too fast-and-loose with their observations of the foliage habits of their introductions.

A situation that does raise my eyebrows a bit is when I receive a ‘dormant’ from a breeder in a very similar climate or not too far from me, only to have it remain green here through the winter. Maybe I am just enough further south of the grower, enough warmer, to not trigger full dormancy? I hope that is all it is. I also suspect that some growers have looser definitions of what a dormant is than I do. For me, if there is any green foliage still present during winter, then I don’t consider it a true dormant. One grower sent me a ‘dormant’ that remained fully green all winter, with foliage identical throughout the winter to Great White (an evergreen), which grew directly beside it. That was ok as it was fully hardy and bloomed late enough not to have any problems. I asked the breeder about this and the reply was, “Oh, yes, it remains green, but its leaves don’t grow at all in the winter and it shows resting buds, so it is a dormant.” 

While it is true that the H. fulva clone Chengtu shows leaves that remain green through cold winters yet develops resting buds, the cultivar I am referring to did not show what I would call resting buds, any more than did Great White, growing beside it. If it was a dormant then so was Great White. None of the evergreens growing here in a normal or hard winter grow new leaves (unless we have an occasional warm spell out of season) and a great many of them don’t have nearly as much green foliage above ground as this ‘dormant’ did. Further, it doesn't match the AHS registration definition of a dormant. I don’t grow this one any more because it turned out to be extremely susceptible to rust, but the foliage habit would not have been any deterrent to me buying or using the plant.

Center - a registered 'dormant' that is one of the most evergreen cultivars I am currently growing...

Foliage habit seems to be a continuum, moving from the true, hard dormant all the way to the true evergreen, with a range of variations in-between. For me, and based on the AHS definition of a dormant, it is only those cultivars that go fully dormant that are true dormants. However, there are cultivars that are probably genetically dormant while also having some small amount of modifier genes from evergreen ancestors and are close to the true, hard dormant on the continuum, but don’t express as true, hard dormants in many (most?) environments. These may be what some refer to as ‘semi-dormant’ and to me should be registered as semi-evergreens, rather than dormants, but it seems these frequently get registered as ‘dormant’. When I walk through my garden in the winter, I observe a good many registered ‘dormants’ with a bit of foliage sticking up out of the dead leaves. These are not the resting buds of true dormants, but are small fans with obvious leaves, even though they may be quite small.

Another problem is that in the far north, cultivars will go fully dormant that won’t even this far south, and may be full evergreen in the near tropical south. I always try to bear these many environmentally influenced variations in mind, as I don’t want to think badly of anyone or think anyone is being deceptive, and while that may make me have my head in the sand, it allows me to just shrug it off and move forward. After all, as a breeder, I can always work toward the foliage habit I want in my garden, in my own program.

Another thing that I sometimes hear, but have not observed personally, is there being any direct correlation between foliage habit and foliage quality. I have seen beautiful blue-green foliage on all foliage habits, and I have seen sickly, ugly foliage on all foliage habits. These variations in foliage color/quality seem to have nothing to do with foliage habit and are likely genes separate from the genes controlling foliage habit.

One final point that I want to touch on concerns foliage habit and rust resistance/susceptibility. I have been told by several northern breeders that their cultivars are ‘likely resistant, because they are good hard dormants”, the implication being that only evergreens are rust susceptible. This is absolutely false. There is absolutely no linkage what so ever between foliage habit and rust susceptibility/resistance. I have cultivars of all foliage types that show strong rust resistance, and I have cultivars of all foliage types that show rust susceptibility. I can assure you that foliage habit has nothing to do with this and neither does foliage color or cold-hardiness/tenderness. The genes of resistance/susceptibility are not the same genes as those that determine foliage traits.

I will say that I actually have more highly resistant evergreen and semi-evergreen cultivars than I do resistant dormant cultivars. Again, this has nothing to do with foliage habit. I suspect this is because breeders in the south have had to contend with rust now for over a decade and so they have been able to evaluate cultivars for resistance (so there is some information on these available) and some few breeders in the south have actually been breeding for rust resistance now for a good long while. Conversely, cultivars in the north are not being evaluated for rust resistance with any frequency nor is much selection for rust resistance being done in the north.

In defense of northern breeders, this is understandable, as they don’t have the conditions to evaluate for rust, but it does mean that northern cultivars are thus an unknown quantity in this regard. So my experience points to there possibly being more susceptibility amongst many hardy, northern dormant lines by default, than there is amongst some of the lineages (but certainly not all!) of southern-bred evergreens and semi-evergreens, but this has nothing to do with foliage habit and rather is caused by environmental constraints and chance.

In closing, I would like to encourage people to talk about the subject of foliage habit. I know some people get offended, but these things are just facts. We in colder climates don’t say that some evergreens do poorly, or don’t perform to their full potential, to offend people. Dormancy is not a marketing scam (I have actually been told that!), nor is it an attempt to vilify those breeding evergreens. Every foliage type is important and necessary. Not every plant will prosper in every garden. This is a simple fact of life. Sometimes that is related to their foliage type/cold hardiness, and sometimes it isn’t. When someone in the north relates that a given southern-bred cultivar has done poorly in his or her garden, being harmed or killed in the winter, this is not an attack on the breeder of that plant. If I introduce a hard dormant and a southern grower buys it and it dies, quickly or gradually, I know that many hard dormants often don’t survive in warm areas, so I can’t take that personally. Why should the reverse situation be any any different?

I fully understand why southern breeders focus on evergreen/semi-evergreen foliage and I understand why northerners tend to focus more toward dormants. I don’t in any way blame southern growers for growing and breeding the foliage that works best for them. Why on earth would they not? I grow and breed what works best in my garden, as should everyone else. Further, it seems intuitively obvious to me that no southern breeder can know beyond a shadow of a doubt how any of their introductions will behave in cold climates until they have actually been grown in cold climates in many parts of the continent, and they should be aware that there are instances where a plant is hardier in the far north with constant snow cover all winter than they might be in less cold areas where there is not a constant snow cover and where temperatures can fluctuate a great deal. Conversely, the same can be said for any plant bred in the north in regards to its ability to survive and flourish in the south.

It is only by exchanging information and our experiences that we can start to gather a broad base of information to help people in making proper cultivar choices for their area. I would think this would be important to all of us, because successful gardeners are probably going to stay with it longer than people who constantly have failures due to poor cultivar choices for their area. I hope that this post can help to generate a civil and friendly discussion and that we can share our information and experiences without hurt feelings or angry responses and through that sharing only improve our understanding of, and success with, our beloved daylilies.