A fun, expert-built resource to help you spot, grow, and love Daylilies (Hemerocallis)!

Quick Wins

Exotic Starfish

This daylily field guide brings together daylily 101 basics, flower forms, plant anatomy, and starter hybridizing tips in one place. Whether you’re brand new to Hemerocallis or refining your eye for traits, this guide will help you understand what you’re seeing in the garden and choose better plants and seeds.

  • Sun & Soil: Full sun (6–8 hrs) for best bloom. Well‑drained soil; add compost at planting.

  • Water: Deep weekly soak during scape/bud set. Avoid chronic soggy feet.

  • Feeding: Simple 10-10-10 spring feed with follow-up midseason top‑dress if soil requires it. Potassium in the late fall for over winter root health.

  • Divide: Every 3–5 years as clumps slow down.

  • Deadhead / Disbud: Snip spent blooms for tidiness; remove forming pods if you want more rebloom.

  • Cold Notes: Most cultivars shrug off winter and require not extra effort; for tender plants mulch late fall after the ground is cool or even cover with leaves or hey.

  • New to daylilies? Get ready for some fun! There are tons of strong workhorses you can enjoy and then collect the fancy faces. You can browse our available daylilies in the store.

Daylily 101

  • Fan: The basic unit of foliage plus crown. Plants are sold as single fan (SF), double fan (DF), or clumps (3+ fans).
  • Crown: The compressed stem where roots and leaves originate; plant with crown ~1–2″ below the surface.
  • Roots: Fleshy storage roots (tubers, not bulbs); appreciate even moisture but must have drainage.
  • Scape: Leafless stalk carrying branches, buds, and proliferations (baby plants that sometimes form on scapes).
  • Bud → Bloom: One‑day flowers with tepals (petals + sepals), eye/halo/pattern, throat, stamen (anther with pollen), and pistil (stigma–style–ovary). Some cultivars are fragrant or night/opening types.

Hemerocallis (daylily) isn’t a true lily; it’s a hardy perennial with grassy fans of foliage and leafless flowering stalks called scapes. Each bloom typically opens for a single day — but good plants carry many buds and open new flowers for weeks. Decades of hybridizing have expanded colors, patterns, edges, and forms, from spiders to doubles and patterned eyes.

Dark Gethsemane

Understanding Flower Forms

Daylilies don’t just bloom—they perform. Round classics, spider-sleek silhouettes, sculpted UFs, plush doubles, even polymerous oddities: a whole design studio growing from one genus.

Single Form

Blue Tooth

A single daylily flower has 3 petals + 3 sepals (6 tepals total), 6 stamens, and 1 pistil—the basic blueprint for the genus.

Many modern singles read as “round” or “bagel” in the garden (broad segments with overlap), but that rounded look is descriptive only—“round” is not a separate ADS registration class.

Blue Tooth

Sculpted Form

Small World National Treasure

Sculpted daylilies show three-dimensional structural features that rise up from the throat, midrib, or other parts of the petal surface. ADS recognizes three sculpted sub-forms:

  • Pleated – Deep longitudinal creases on each side of the midrib fold the petal and create a raised “platform” running out from the throat.
  • Cristate – Appendages of extra petal tissue grow from the midrib or elsewhere on the petal surface; these ridges or crests are sculpted, not extra petal whorls, so a cristate single is not automatically a double.
  • Relief – Vertically raised ridges extend from the throat and project above the petal surface, sometimes parallel to the veins, sometimes radiating outward from the midrib.

All sculpted forms are still evaluated on top of the underlying flower type (single, double, etc.); “sculpted” describes surface architecture, not the basic whorl count.

Small World National Treasure

Double Form

Ann's Blue Eyes

Double daylilies have extra floral parts beyond the normal single form and come in two main ADS-recognized expressions:

  • Hose-in-hose double – Extra whorls (layers) of petals create the effect of a flower within a flower.
  • Peony-type double – Petaloid (petal-like) stamens—and sometimes petaloid carpels—form an extra, frilly mass of tissue inside the normal petal whorl.

Ann’s Blues Eyes

Polymerous Form

Defining Moment

Polymerous daylilies have more than the normal three sepals and three petals, with the extra segments evenly spaced in their whorls—for example, a “4×4” bloom (4 sepals + 4 petals) or “5×5” bloom.

Key points that distinguish polymerous flowers from simple doubles:

  • The added sepals and petals maintain radial symmetry; they are not stacked or piled on like extra petaloid tissue.

  • The stamen count increases accordingly (e.g., 8 stamens for a 4×4 flower, 10 for a 5×5), but there is still only one pistil.

  • Doubles, in contrast, involve extra petal whorls or petaloid stamens inside the normal whorls; polymerous describes extra, evenly spaced segments, not extra layers.

Some cultivars are both polymerous and double and are treated as multiform in ADS terminology, but polymerous alone is a distinct, structural form.

Defining Moment

Unusual Form

Two Faced Floozy

Unusual Form (UF) daylilies are classified exclusively by form, not by color or pattern. To qualify, the flower must show distinctive petal or sepal shapes on all three petals or all three sepals, and must fall into one (or more) of three basic shape groups: crispate, cascade, or spatulate.

  • Crispate – Floral segments are pinched, twisted, or quilled. Pinched crispates have sharp folds; twisted crispates show a corkscrew/pinwheel effect; quilled crispates roll into a tube along their length.
  • Cascade (cascading/curling) – Narrow segments with pronounced curling or cascading, revolving upon themselves like wood shavings or curled ribbon.
  • Spatulate – Segments markedly wider at the tips, like a kitchen spatula.

UFs often look more open and airy, with visible spaces between the segments, and were formally created to recognize long-petaled forms whose ratios keep them outside the spider class.

Two Faced Floozy

Spider Form

Ghost Ranger

The Spider Form is a measurement-based ADS class. A spider daylily has petals whose length is at least four times the petal’s width, a ratio of ≥ 4.0:1, measured using the ADS spider measuring method (usually on the longest, often the lowest, petal).

  • Any color, pattern, or edge can be a spider—the classification is entirely about the petal length-to-width ratio.
  • The older “spider variant” category (4.0–4.99:1) was retired in 2003; those cultivars are now simply registered as spiders.

In the garden, spiders read as long, narrow, often dramatic silhouettes, but it’s the numbers, not the vibe, that determine the class.

Ghost Ranger

Daylily Flower Anatomy

Hemerocallis flava L. (syn. H. lilioasphodelus), the yellow daylily.

Hemerocallis fulva L., the tawny/orange daylily.

1 — Flower Dissection

Longitudinal (median) section of a flower showing the tepals (3 petals + 3 sepals), stamens (filament + anther), and the pistil (stigma, style, and superior ovary).

Transverse (cross) section of the ovary showing three locules (3 fused carpels) with axile placentation (ovules attached to the central axis).

Stamens removed from the flower: each with a slender filament and a two-lobed anther.

The pistil removed: style with terminal stigma (ovary at the base in the flower).

Longitudinal section of the ovary showing the three chambers (locules) and their ovules (axile placentation).

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Hybridizing Basics

Make your own magic!

  1. Choose Parents: Match ploidy (Dip × Dip, Tet × Tet) for best fertility.
  2. Pollinate: Morning of a fresh bloom, dust pollen from the anther onto a compatible stigma.
  3. Tag & Track: Record pod parent × pollen parent.
  4. Harvest: Pods ripen in ~6 weeks. Harvest and allow to dry, store seeds in safe place.
  5. Get excited about the all possibilities!

Starter goal: Aim for branching + bud count first (garden performance), then chase edges, eyes, and other forms/traits.

Shop Seeds → Explore select Dooley Gardens crosses and seed lots.

Glossary

  • Anther – Pollen‑bearing tip of a stamen.

  • Branching – Side branches on a scape that increase bud capacity and bloom display.

  • Bud Count – Total buds + pods + bloom scars on a scape; a proxy for length of display.

  • Crown – Compressed stem at soil level where leaves and roots originate.

  • Diploid (Dip) – Two chromosome sets (2n=22); crosses best with other dips.

  • Double – Flowers with extra petaloid tissue for a fuller look.

  • Dormant / Semi‑evergreen / Evergreen – Foliage behaviors across winter; also used as cultivar descriptors.

  • Eye / Halo / Pattern – Color accents around the throat; “patterned” blooms show multi‑ring or broken color zones.

  • Fan (SF/DF/Clump) – A plant division unit; sales shorthand for number of fans in a division.

  • Fertility (Pod/Pollen) – A cultivar’s ability to set seed (pod) and donate pollen.

  • Spider – Very long, narrow segments (length:width ≥ 4.0:1 is classic spider).

  • Unusual Form (UF) – Petal behavior such as pinched, crispate, or cascading.

  • Polymerous – More than three sepals and three petals; often written 4×4, 5×5, etc.
  • Fragrance – Detectable scent; varies by cultivar and weather.
  • Hybridize – Make deliberate crosses; typically match ploidy (Dip×Dip, Tet×Tet).
  • Pistil – Female floral parts: stigma, style, ovary.

  • Ploidy – Number of chromosome sets per cell; affects fertility and often substance/texture.

  • Proliferation – Small plant that forms on a scape; can be rooted.
  • Rebloom – Secondary flush of scapes/blooms after the initial season.
  • Rust – Fungal leaf disease; mostly cosmetic in gardens; manage with hygiene and labeled fungicides if needed.
  • Scape – Leafless flowering stalk bearing buds, branches, and blooms.
  • Stamen – Male parts: filament + anther with pollen.
  • Substance – Thickness/texture of the bloom; influences weather resistance.

  • Tetraploid (Tet) – Four chromosome sets (2n=44); crosses best with other tets.

  • Throat – Inner center of the bloom, usually green to yellow.
  • Tepal – General term for petal/sepals when not distinguished.

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