The Daylily Place: Polytepal Daylilies

The following information has been contributed by members of the Daylily E-Mail Round Robin for your enjoyment.

Polytepalous flowers have more petals and/or sepals than usual for blooms of the variety. In daylilies, as in most monocotyledons, a normal bloom has three petals and three sepals. In a polytepal, there will be, e.g., four petals and four sepals. In rare instances, there have been occurrences of five petal-sepal sets. The information below will show you some examples of polytepal daylily blooms.

TAHITIAN SUNRISE (Bearce, '90) Tetraploid, 30" tall, Semi-Evergreen; flower 5" scarlet self. Registered as La, but blooming as VL. The flower shown is a polytepal form, many of which showed up in the garden during the hot 1995 summer and again in 1996, but TAHITIAN SUNRISE may produce very few of these polytepal blossoms in some years.
Image and text contributed by Jim Shields.

BY MYSELF (Peck) A beautiful gold flower registered by the late Dr. Virginia Peck in 1971 and introduced in 1973. Tetraploid, Ht. 32 inches, Midseason bloom, flower 6.5 inches, dormant. Allen McLain also reported a polytepal on this variety; how frequently does BY MYSELF produce poly blooms?
Image contributed by Paul Aucoin.

DEMPSEY FOURSOME (Dempsey) Registered 1992, diploid, ht. 24 inches, early season bloom, flower 6 inches, dormant.

The following comments are by Bobby Baxter, Raleigh, NC:
"A beautiful poly pink with purple eye. New this summer but it did bloom close to 100% poly for me. Good increase already noted and it is registered as a rebloomer. Great full form and an eye catcher. I do know several people in North Carolina who have lost this plant and so I recommend buying it in the Spring as a precaution to get it established before winter. Then mulch well."
Image contributed by Joe Agosta.

For information about the Daylily E-mail Round Robin, contact:
The E-mail Robin leader, Tim Fehr, at fehrtj@uwec.edu.

For information about daylilies, visit the Friends of the Daylilies and Daylilies along the Information Highway.

The opinions expressed by contributors to these pages are solely those of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the account owner, the other members of the Daylily E-mail Round Robin, or of the Friends of the Daylilies. For information about this account, contact:

James E. Shields, jshields@indy.net

Last revised: Novemver 10, 1996.