Hybridizing the 'Cherry Hill' way
Use the most promising of your own seedlings
In the 14 years we have been hybridizing, our focus has taken several turns and twists and at least one derailment. When we started buying, we didn't care if something was a diploid or a tetraploid. We just wanted one of every color! Three years later, after an eye-opening trip to Soule's Garden in Indianapolis, Nancy started us down the path toward creating new daylilies on our own. At first we were infatuated with teeth and creating more daylilies with teeth, so several years into hybridizing, we started to discard all the diploids we had collected. We were going to create some toothy tets!
Following our success at creating a beautiful toothy bloom on a plant registered as Rosy Cotton's Ribbons, we lost sight of specific hybridizing goals and crossed anything with everything. Looking back on our hybridizing records, we suddenly had no focus at all.
Progress with our seedlings really started once we focused on breeding within specific programs and began working with our own seedlings as parents to a 'new and improved' generation. We concur with other growers in promoting this approach. As it is often stated, buy the best you can afford and then work with your own seedlings toward improvement. As hybridizer David Robinson recently told our local society, when you buy someone else's plants, you are 6 or 7 years behind them since they have been working with that plant as a seedling while it was being readied for market. If you constantly bring in new material for your program, you will stay 6 or 7 years behind other growers. You need to be observant, choose the best and work to improve your own lines. Great advice!
Progress in Some Current Cherry Hill Programs
Although there are many toothy daylilies on the market, there seems to be a lack of orange ones with teeth, so that is one of our goals. We started with a modern rich red-orange with a great edge named Sea of Cinders from Salter. From that we bred Extreme Tangerine (Horns x Sea of Cinders). From Extreme Tangerine, we have some very promising seedlings:
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One passion of Nancy's is white daylilies with a red eye and edge. She created Cherry Pie a la Mode from a cross of Empire of Dawn and Dusk with Ruby Lipstick. She is now working to improve on it...
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One of our introductions, Sonoran Desert Rose, is a plant that was selected for excellent bud count and health, and has also been a great parent for us as a pathway to better things to come...
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Other programs here at Cherry Hill are seeing the same results once we began to focus on specific colors and/or characteristics and breed from our best crossed with our best, at times with siblings or back-crosses to parents. Once in a while, we do outcross to something new, but that is reserved for something with a characteristic we don't have in our current strain. By breeding within our own plants, we are moving ahead on other programs in addition to the above...tall and small dips and tets, and fancy late bloomers with eyes, edges, and teeth.
In sum, we recommend that other hybridizers try this method. It is always possible to get something outstanding from a cross from two other hybridizers, but we have found that by sticking within our own 'strain' we have increased our chances of getting an intro-worthy plant. Give it a try!
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