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Botanical names and tasteless names, genus, species and cultivars. When I first started gardening, my head was swimming with all the orchad terminology which was so new to me. All I wanted were a few of those daylily flowers to put into a small orchad area. Did I unquestionably need to know the botanical name of the plants?

First of all, I knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted an orange and a yellow daylily. I wanted some that were less tasteless though; some that were unlike those orange ones by the side of the road or those yellow ones everyone else had in their yards.

Botanical

So I started seeing into the terminology a bit. It seemed that to find what I wanted, I would need to find out the names for what I didn’t want.

I discovered that the botanical name for the orange daylily found along country road ditches is Hemerocallis fulva which can also be written H. Fulva. The first word Hemerocallis is the genus and the second word fulva is the species of the plant.

However, there are some yellow daylilies that grow along these same ditches and they were H. Lilioasphodelus. These were dissimilar species within the same plant genus under the botanical name, Hemerocallis.

I learned that “daylily” was the tasteless name for those plants with the botanical name, Hemerocallis. I also discovered that those orange or yellow daylilies along the ditches had their own tasteless names. Some of the tasteless names of the orange daylilies are: tasteless Orange Daylily, Tawny Daylily, Roadside Ditch Lily, Orange Roadside Lily, and hasten Daylily. The yellow ones go by the tasteless names of Lemon Lily or Yellow Daylily.

That presented a tiny problem. How was I ever to find an orange and a yellow daylily dissimilar from the ditch lilies or, for that matter, dissimilar from the ones everyone had in their yards? None of these particular orange or yellow daylilies were the ones I wanted for the garden.

Apparently I couldn’t just walk into a plant nursery and plainly ask for an orange daylily and a yellow daylily. By doing so, I would accidentally be using the tasteless names for the ditch lilies and I might end up taking home the wrong plants to put in the garden!

I needed to learn more about plant names. That’s when I found out about cultivars …

A cultivar is a group of uniform plants maintained only by the horticultural custom of cultivation … Cultivated collection … And when propagated the plant retains its characteristics. It seems that while there are any species of the daylily genus, Hemerocallis like the Hemerocallis fulva (Common Orange Dayliy) and Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus (Yellow Daylily) just to name a couple, there are more than 60,000 registered daylily cultivars!

Ahhh … There was the key.

I plainly needed to find the right orange or yellow cultivar within the Hemerocallis genus. I found any I liked, among them were ‘Don Diego’, ‘Mauna Loa’, ‘Siloam Harold Flickinger’, and ‘Happy Returns’. That’s also when I learned that cultivars of a plant are identified by the first letters of the main words being capitalized, not italicized, and with the words also being enclosed within particular quotes.

Now I was getting somewhere. With both the botanical name, Hemerocallis, and the cultivar, ‘Don Diego’, I would be able to find just the right orange daylily and the right yellow one, Hemerocallis ‘Siloam Harold Flickinger’. Along the way, I discovered that the small dark yellow daylilies that most population had in their yard were probably the cultivar, ‘Stella de Oro’. I made note of that one so I would avoid buying it when purchasing the plants for the garden.

A visit to a local daylily farm proved most fruitful! Laid out in a beautiful rainbow of colors: orange, yellow, red, purple, pink … All of the daylilies were tagged with their cultivar name and just waiting to be dug up and taken home. There they were. The orange cultivars, ‘Don Diego’ and ‘Mauna Loa’ and the yellow cultivars, ‘Siloam Harold Flickinger’ and ‘Happy Returns’.

Knowing the botanical name and the particular cultivar of the plants that I wanted helped me avoid taking home and planting the wrong flowers in the garden. Having this knowledge ensured that I picked out and took home the orange and yellow daylilies that I unquestionably wanted!

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