Gonzer, Very nice selection of ionanthas',gonzer. Your post saves time looking for pics of all the different varieties available,sort of a catalog of ionantha species. I'm surprised at the Mexican and Guatemalan size difference.Like,how do they know which side of the border they are growing on? ;) 'Rosita' and 'Rubra' look quite a bit alike,fine leaved and delicate. Thanks for taking the time to pic and post. If you have some favorite sources that offer clumps at a fair price,I'd like to know. (email would do) Bob

Yes, Kitty looks quite similar to Bob. Bob had tufts on his ears, one of the traits of Manx cats (besides the bobtail), and large feet for walking on rocky slopes in Scotland (my Scottish DH says). :) He has big feet too. He came about that name more because of his personality than his tail as most people believed. When he first came here looking for handouts, he would come at supper time every night with another cat. For weeks the two stayed back a ways, but one came closer than the other and soon he was coming within a few feet of me. They would come and go and sometime I wouldn't see them for a week or two. One night when I looked out the back door window, I chuckled to see that he was sitting off just a little ways, waiting for food to be put out on the patio. When he spotted me, he began rubbing on one of the posts and working his big paws. DH asked "Is that big cat out there again?!" I said, "Yes. He never really leaves. See? He's still there!" "He's just like Bob in the movie, What About Bob!". We both laughed and so, Bob it was! He really seemed to like that name. In a few days, he was coming up to us and eating with the other cats, purring and rubbing and making biscuits. He liked the affection even more than the food...and boy did he like food! Very soon, Bob started coming inside and he never again left the property. Everything he needed was right here. He was VERY bad about peeing though and he was quite a scrapper, so a trip to the vet was in order. He never quit backing up to things and peeing, but at least it didn't stink anymore. Hey! He only had ONE bad flaw! (ugh) Everybody loved Bob...so he was also like the character in the movie in that sense, too. :) He was absolutely Bob o'licious! ~Annie

Hi I have read most of this stuff before too. It kind of overwhelms you. I agree that you can read it and think you know what they are talking about but none of it stays in there!!I was a chemist as well and really never liked all that memory stuff. Even memorizing all those amino acids in Biochem seemed like waste at the time.I think my problem is more the botany than the genetics. I just don't know enough about plants period to figure out how the color stuff works. Larry - Here's my summaryThe Mahieu stuff about brown is pretty limited. I can only find 2 brown daylilies on his site that he has registered - Hooded cobra and Death adder. It sounds like browns are very unstable and blacks are better to work with. The browns are combinations of fulvous orange pigments with blues and purples. They are very sensitive to the temperature. He does mention one good point and that is it is important to get a good waxy coating or something like that on dayliles that are subject to water spotting. The water soluble pigments that make red and purple are in the upper layer of the flower and are easily spotted if there isn't something else protecting them. Maybe this would help with color fading in the sun as well. Tom Rood discusses many good daylilies to breed with but doesn't really go into detail about why. He does mention more about some traits being dominat etc than other articles I have found. His hybridizng basics ie the mechanics- are very informative.Harts articles are very indepth. It is very humbling to be having difficulty understading his material for "non scientists". The article on pigments doesn't really offer much basic color information mostly how the pigments work. Grenn melon and yellow pigments are produced by the plastics - a thing in the cell. These plastids are not passed on by the pollen parent which is very interesting and I wil have to think for a while what that means for color breeding. These plastids are also not found in the upper layer of cells - the epidermis and so those pigments make up the under color of a flower. Does this mean a yellow flower has all those pigments in lower layers and there are no pigments in upper layers? Blue and red pigments are water soluble and exist in the cell sap( the liquid that fills the cell and that all the parts float around in). It is concentrated in the upper cell layers of the flower. A cross section of a petal will show these layers. The color that results from these pigments can be affected be anything that changes the pH of the cell sap. I can think of the soil - any other factors you can think of? That is why they look different in different gardens. As we all know these are the colors red and purple that fade in the sun the worst and that water spot. It makes sense if they are just below the surface. Somehow environmental factors affect the behavior of the different enzymes that control the formation of the various pigments. I am still not sure how that works. I have read other places about how the sun can affect ruffling by changing the cells in the lower layer of the flower segment more than the upper layer and thus ruffling or puckering happens. I guess the genetics for that to happen are already in the plant and the different climatic conditions just enhance the phenotypic result. These environtmental factors are just one of the things I have trouble understanding as it doesn't seem to happen in people that I can think of.One thing I did get out of Hart's genetics articles was the fact that no one is growing long enough crosses to ever get the recessive mutation that it is going to take to get a blue daylily. It makes sense to me. It is really going to be a freaky thing if it ever happens. Somehow the gene(s) that cause blue to appear in daylily eyes needs to be mutated so blue can appear in the rest of the petal. I don't really get how eyes happen anyways and are edges just a mutation along the line some where? It is very complicated. I have read that if enough people are working on it it will happen but maybe there will never be enough offspring of one cross to see the mutation. That part I understand. Hope some of this makes sense to you. I think I really need to get a good botany book and learn about plant cells. Then maybe I will understand how diamond dusting and velvety finishes can happen when the surface cells change shape. I really tried to take Botany first year but had a conflict and ended up with Microbiology. What a waste that was on me. Plants are really cool!!Resting my brain now!!Debbie

well, another epie bloomed....and it was mislabeled as well. It was suppose to be pink, came out white.