I’ve been doing some research on daylilies this week. I wanted to check on the flowers of an old British variety ‘Red Precious’. So, naturally, I googled it and took a look at the results.

The two first pages I looked at showed what appeared to be two different plants. Here are the two pages, one from the fine plant and garden photographer John Glover and the second from the expert plantsman John Jearrard. Click on each to see the difference even more clearly.

Of course, I took a look at written descriptions too but that can be frustrating. The fount of all wisdom on daylilies, the American Hemerocallis Society, has no picture and simply says this: “bloom size: 3.5 inches. bloom season: Midseason-Late. Color: brilliant red self.” Not exactly detailed. My own Encyclopedia of Perennials, I have to say, is not exactly crammed with detail on the color, either: “Small, brilliant red, 9cm (31/2in)…”.  ‘Red Precious’ does not feature in the RHS/AHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants.

Bob Brown in his Cotswold Garden Flowers online encyclopedia says “Wonderful deep bright red flowers with yellow highlights… Nice old-fashioned narrowish petals…” First mention of those yellow streaks seen in the John Glover picture.

 In Diana Grenfell’s excellent Gardener’s Guide to Growing Daylilies the picture shows the yellow streak but on a mahogany flower, and there’s no printed description.

So, I search in Google Books. A reference comes up to the Proceedings of The Royal Horticultural Society from 1983 but the extract of text it gives is the wrong one. Huh. So I dash downstairs to the dusty corner where all this arcane stuff is stored in rarely consulted volumes and I find that the one volume in my seventy year run of the Proceedings of The Royal Horticultural Society - is the one that’s missing. Off to the RHS website – nothing (more on that aspect another time).

So… It can be challenging, just trying to get a good description of one daylily. Sigh… Time to go and plant that rhododendron we bought yesterday.