oh yeah, another question I forgot that I've been meaning to ask. has nothing to do w/ crossing. There was a post about daylilies not blooming due to planting to deep. If I remember correctly someone said not to plant above the crown. Ok, so can someone please tell me exactly what/where the crown is? I have a habit of planting plants too deep. Also, no daylily blooms last year. I just planted my new purchases, and I think I may have not planted them deep enough.

This page will give you a lot of answers...

http://www.daylilies.org/ahs_dictionary/dictionary.html

You have to breed dip to dip, tet to tet. I really dont think there is any way you can tell by just looking at one. As far as a daylily being unique, there are so many more characteristics than just the flower. The plant habit, dormancy, evergreen-ness, blooming time, bud count. For instance, I have many many yellows in my garden. They all have subtle differences. But just like children...if you have 20 children no two will be exactly alike. I know people have tried repeat crosses of daylilies that have previously produced a super daylily and never came up with anything near the same. I guess thats part of the fun with daylilies, you just never know. With 50,000 registered daylilies, theres a pretty large gene pool to play with.

How do you tell a tet from a dip?

hard way - look at the pollen under a microscope, ones's pollen is much larger. I can't remember which.
easy way - see what it was registered as

UFos are unusual forms.

Every seed produces a new daylily. you could do the same cross a hundred times and plant 500 seeds and no two will be exactly the same. For example Ed Brown X Seminole Wind gave us Belle Cook, and Half Moon Key, and Maid for a King, and the reverse cross gave us No More Tears and Call Me Pretty.

Edward

Two children of the same two human parents will be very different. Even "identical twins" exhibit differences.

The daylily crown is essentially the whitish thick area where the plant comes out of the roots.

You may not have planted too deeply last year - often DLs take a year to settle in, so they may not bloom the first year.

You really can't tell the difference between dips, trips and tets. Do some research or try crossing a particular plant with known plants. Wait until you actually have seeds in hand from a cross before you designate a plate dip or tet. Trips rarely reproduce by seed, so most of them are available strictly as clones that have been around a long time.
A tet has twice the chromosome matter for each trait compared to the dip. So everything is bigger, thicker, more robust with the tets. Generally tet foliage is much coarser and stiffer, flower substance is improved and colors are much deeper, more saturated. I can usually guess most tets but every now and then a dip will fool you. ORANGE VELVET and EL PADRE come to mind as tet like dips.
No, as other have said, you cannot cross different ploidy. There are claims of rare instances where a dip will cross with a tet, but insect, air or other pollination is more apt to be the cause.
With each parent in a diploid cross contributing 11 chromosomes, you have a little over a million possible variations. With a tet, you have around 8 million variations. So if you make the same cross long enough, you will duplicates, but probably not in your lifetime.
There are excellent planting instructions over at the AHS site. Here's a link.
Ed

Here is a link that might be useful: AHS Site - daylily parts

If have to guess,as in a lost tag,name unknown,I was told by a Hybrdizer,whom I shan't throw under the bus, that Dip scapes were a lot thinner than Tets.Also I have noticed that among the ones in my garden, the Dip will have a much smaller end on the pistil for the pollen to enter so the big fat Tet pollen doesn't go in.This is by no means scientific, and no where near 100% accurate.Looking it upas Edward said is the simplest way. Go to the AHS website or Tinkers and do a search.There are some Dip/Tet crosses that have been successful, but the pods(if you get any)usually abort.
Don't raise the crown up out of the soil like Irises.The base of the fan will be whiteish where it was previously under the soil.

Betsy

Well, I have two clumps of Barbara Mitchell. I am convinced that one is a conversion as I have used it several time with Tets and seed have been produced. If fact, I have one right now with a scape. It's a cross with Ed Brown x Barbara Mitchell. When I tried ( my scientific way ) to cross the other BM with a tet, it will not set seed. I got both of these from a friend who has gone to be with the Lord, but she also had them in different areas. What do you think has happened?....Ellie

Ellie,
It certainly could be that one is tetra BARBARA MITCHELL. It has been around for some time, being in the background of plants like Stamile's SEMINOLE WIND.
I often find one scape will be more fertile than other scapes in the same clump. I find that once a scapes starts setting pods, it is likely to set more. Some clumps are also more fertile than others of the same plant. I think it's primarily how established the clump is.
A common trick to use on a reluctant tet is to use good dip pollen on it. 99 of 100 attempts will set a pod. It takes the plant about 3-4 weeks to figure out there is no viable seed and aborts the pod, but while the pod is on the scape, you can set pods with tet pollen, much more readily.
If you want to see if you have tetra BARBARA MITCHELL, get up early and go out and cut all the unripened stamens from one of the BM flowers and bag the remaining flower. Also bag the ED BROWN flower you want to use the pollen from. Come back out when the pollen has ripened and make your cross. Re-bag the pollinated flower. This will make sure no bees have beat you to the flower or insects have contaminated the pollen you applied. Then if you get some viable seeds from the pod, you have a good argument that it was a good cross.
All the studies I have seen conclude insects pollinate flowers much, much more often than those rare genetic accidents.
Ed

There are Diploids that produce seed with Tetrapolid pollen, and the Triploid H. fulva Europa will occasionally produce seed with Tetrapolid pollen. It took hundreds of crosses to get 4 seeds but I did it last summer. H. fulva Korea, and H. fulva Hankow are Diploids that will set seed readily with Tetraploid pollen. Neither plant is very self fertile and blooms that I did not pollinate did not produce any seed. On the other hand the Korean form sets 90% of the time when pollinated with Tetraploid pollen giving anywhere from 3 (lowest number) to 15 (highest number) seeds per pod. Oddly when I pollinated a few blooms with Diploid pollen, the resulting seed was smaller, and the pod gave me 12 to 18 seeds per pod.

There are other diploids that work with Tetraploid pollen too, ED MURRAY, and LIGHTS OF DETROIT are 2 that come to mind, there are others.

I have been fooled many times when I tried to guess if a plant was a Dip or Tet. I check now!

ED MURRAY is an interesting plant. It is registered as a diploid and has 43 children, 38 of which are registered tetraploid.
LIGHTS OF DETROIT is registered tetraploid and has 5 children, all of which are registered diploid. As I recall, LOD was confirmed diploid.

Thanks Ed. I have had seed from a tet set on BM before. I think this is the first to bloom although I have had them grow before. I think I will try your sugestion because, I REALLY WANT TO KNOW!!...Ellie

hi just thought i would give someone something to think over.ice carnival is consided a dip.however it also can be used as a crossover plant used sometimes to cross with tets.also think about polys.

Wow this is very fascinating!! The stuff you can learn.

Thanks xokientx for that link, I must not have seen it before I posted my other post. I book marked it for future referance though!