Botanical names and typical names, genus, species and cultivars. When I initial began gardening, my head was swimming with all the garden terminology which was so new to me. All I wanted were a few of those daylily flowers to put into a modest garden area. Did I genuinely require to know the botanical name of the plants?

Very first of all, I knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted an orange and a yellow daylily. I wanted some that had been much less typical although some that had been unlike those orange ones by the side of the road or those yellow ones everybody else had in their yards.

So I started looking into the terminology a bit. It seemed that to find what I wanted, I would want to uncover 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 initial word Hemerocallis is the genus and the second word fulva is the species of the plant.

Even so, there are some yellow daylilies that grow along these exact same ditches and they were H. lilioasphodelus. These had been diverse species inside the same plant genus under the botanical name, Hemerocallis.

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

That presented a small difficulty. How was I ever to discover an orange and a yellow daylily diverse from the ditch lilies or, for that matter, distinct from the ones everybody had in their yards? None of these certain orange or yellow daylilies had been the ones I wanted for the garden.

Apparently I couldn’t just walk into a plant nursery and merely ask for an orange daylily and a yellow daylily. By performing so, I would accidentally be employing the typical names for the ditch lilies and I could end up taking residence the wrong plants to put in the garden!

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

A cultivar is a group of uniform plants maintained only by the horticultural practice of cultivation … CULTIvated VARiety … and when propagated the plant retains its characteristics. It seems that while there are many 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 far more than 60,000 registered daylily cultivars!

Ahhh … there was the key.

I basically needed to locate the correct orange or yellow cultivar within the Hemerocallis genus. I discovered several 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 initial letters of the principal words being capitalized, not italicized, and with the words also becoming enclosed inside single quotes.

Now I was acquiring somewhere. With both the botanical name, Hemerocallis, and the cultivar, ‘Don Diego’, I would be able to find just the correct orange daylily and the appropriate yellow 1, Hemerocallis ‘Siloam Harold Flickinger’. Along the way, I discovered that the little dark yellow daylilies that most folks had in their yard had been most likely the cultivar, ‘Stella de Oro’. I created note of that 1 so I would stay away from acquiring it when buying the plants for the garden.

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

Knowing the botanical, rather than merely the widespread, names for the genus and cultivar of the plants that I wanted helped me avoid taking property and planting the wrong flowers in the garden. Having this knowledge ensured that I picked out and took residence the daylilies that I really wanted!