Dan Lovett's Daylily Seedlings

D01         (Lacy Marionette x Banana Pepper Spider) x [(Almost Paradise x Decolores) x Decolores]         

This daylily won Best Seedling in the 2006 Mid-Carolina Daylily Society show. It is my favorite to-date of all of my hybridizing efforts. The reasons are 4-way branching and 25 buds on nice, 44” scapes! And its Yellow! My favorite color. Plus it has good bloom size…..7.5”- 8” and measures a 5.5 to 1 petal length-to-width ratio, ie, a true narrow spider. It is a brilliant yellow with a nice green throat.

Twenty-five buds are plenty…..maybe even a little too many. My ideal is about 15-18 buds on a vigorous plant that multiplies rapidly and gives late season blooms from new fans. I realize that this may not be feasible in regions where the season is shorter. Bud count on spiders is generally lower that on other daylily forms. We hear of 30-35 buds on some other classifications, but it is rather rare in spiders. Believe me, the pencil-thin scape on a spider would not support such large numbers of blooms and it would fall over when several blooms opened on the same day, especially if it was wet and windy. Mother Nature knows what she is doing when it comes to lower spider bud count..

I like all colors of daylilies, but yellow is my favorite. A daylily bed is just not complete if it doesn’t have outstanding yellow daylilies. They show up better than any other color. Jeff Salter says that yellow daylilies are the most sophisticated ones in the garden. One thing that attracts me to the broad category of yellow daylilies is simply the tremendous color range and huge variation of what we lump together as “yellow”. Because of it, “yellow” is the most difficult color to describe. You really just have to see it to appreciate it. That is why the term “AYD” (Another Yellow Daylily) has no significance to me.