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Thursday, July 02, 2009

When 1 plus 1 equals 1

A number of years ago my young daughter Emily wanted to hybridize her own daylily. Daylilies are extremely easy to hybridize and she had seen me do so for many years. Her goal was to make one and name it "Mac & Cheese" so she chose two parents that she thought would create her perfect daylily.

This is 'Nutmeg Elf', a little orange daylily that blooms like crazy. It was the pod parent, meaning that it was the Mommy.

This is 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' which was the pollen parent (the Daddy). Both of these daylilies are small, of narrow form, have tall scapes, excellent branching and lots and lots of blooms.

This is one of the resultant children from that cross. Since it's been a number of years (my guess is 5 or 6) since Emily has crossed these two daylilies, the seedlings are large clumps now.

Although I will never register any of these seedlings, I also won't get rid of them. They are excellent landscape daylilies, bringing lots of color and joy to my garden.

Somewhere in my external hard drive I have a photo of Emily making the actual cross. When I have time I'll have to go hunting for it so I can post it here too.

Melanie


6 comments:

Ben said...

That sounds like a lot of fun. I too would love to create some of my own plants. I hope to in the future once I have a few choices of different cultivars. I also wanna try to make a few hosta's :D.

Anonymous said...

Wonderful blooms...and how much fun is that?!!

~~Rhonda said...

So did she name this one "Mac and Cheese"? What fun for her to hybridize her very own. We have lots of daylilies but haven't attempted hybridizing yet. Not enough space to plant and wait on seedlings to show their stuff. Bummer. ~~Rhonda

Becca's Dirt said...

I would love to try that one day. Have a Happy 4th.

Holly said...

what a memory and what a way to encourage a budding scientist and botanist.

Dave said...

Very neat! Is this the same one you mentioned a while back or was this another cross?