All the daylily pods are harvested and there are just a few still drying. With that, I am back in one of my happy places, cleaning data on the tracking spreadsheet, creating pivot tables, slicing and dicing the data. I have a pretty good idea of the top performers – pollen and pod, diploid and tetraploid, and also what I was able to replicate, at least to seed again, from previous years crosses. Soon the 2025 seeds will all go to storage until next March when I set them for stratification.

And it occurs to me, yes, I am definitely back in my happy place. It is full of some things I have loved for years, but it includes an expansion. It includes a new happy place I created last year when I embarked on the Mahala Felton historical research. And so my new “normal” thinking was at work when I began a new search a few days – wondering about daylily history, and specifically what type of daylilies might have been around during the historical times I have been researching. A little AI inquiry ensued, and the results were confirmed. Daylily ‘Apricot’ was the first recorded daylily hybrid, in 1893. And on it went as I was fully in daylily research mode. ‘Apricot’ was the first recorded hybrid 133 years ago, with parentage in still available ‘Flava’. Flava’s origin is listed with a registration date of 1762, and that is probably about as far back as I will get, as the registrar was none other than Carolus Linnaeus, the Father of Taxonomy.

So, fun fact, ‘Flava’ was probably grown in homesteads around this area when it was being settled, but ‘Flava’s child, ‘Apricot’, would not have been in Mahala Felton’s garden, as it was registered the year after she passed, by a school teacher, George Yeld, in England.

Next, my mind went to possibly owning a ‘Flava’ daylily. ‘Flava’ (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus) looks so sweet and is supposed to be lemon fragrant. Who wouldn’t like that? What would self-seed look like? Would it even go to seedling? Would seedlings ever bloom? And what could I do with that?

‘Apricot’, when researched, makes quite a family tree. I could get lost. I probably will at some point lol. History x Daylilies? Yeah. I will find myself hours later, emerging to find my tea is cold and I need to rest my eyes.

I see the best chance of getting a ‘Flava’ is spring. That means I have all fall and winter to research and dream. And anything I would do would be years out for results anyways. But it is a line I think would be worth at least investigating. It is a diploid, and although Pink Tirza is my diploid line, I could have a “historical line”. Right? Could I rein in to self-seed only and make room for that? It is an intriguing thought.

For now, I leave you with pictures of the last three seed pods, pulled a bit early probably, due to circumstances, but still hovering around 60 days maturity. They should be OK, and if not, they are duplicates of others that did fully mature.