I have no idea about daylillies, but it is possible that something accidental came up. This year, a day lily florished behind the shade of my lemon bush. How did it get there? I have no idea, but I believe it is disease resistant, as there is no sun to florish. It is pure white. Since then, I moved the bulb to a place where it can do even better. Maybe it do twice as good. There is no daylillies in sight where I live, so maybe a bird ate seeds and pooped it close by that place...

Enrique

Enrique

Holly Iowa,

Botanists have developed a system to clarity the relationship of plants into a comprehensive diversely branched family tree of classifications, which includes all known plants. The complete ascending sequence is species, genus, family, order, class and division. To access information about the possible chances of hybrids between different types of plants, one needs to find out how they are classified. The chances of glads and daylillies crossing would be unlikely since the classification of plants, and their ability to intercross between themselves, is limited in direct relationship to the ascending sequence (species, genus, family, order, class and division.

Gladiolus, as we know, is a genus that has 180 species, and our cultivars today are nearly impossible to be from a singles species. They are a mix of many species. But it worth noting that we can't keep going up the ascending classification of plants to the family and order and expect hybridizations to just happen. I included below the scientific classification of glads and daylillies for further clarity.

Scientific classification: Gladiolus belong to the family Iridaceae.

Day lilies belong to the family Liliaceae, The family Liliaceae belongs to the order Liliales.

I hope this explains why hybrids don't just 'happen' between order, class, and division. Morphology terms could be addressed but there is little reason to go into those on this forum. One of my majors was Botany, but that was a third of a century ago, and I am not remembering everything.

Tom

In some areas, gladioli self seed very readily and quickly, and the seedlings are often inferior in colour and size, to the parents. It sounds like you have a bunch of gladioli seedlings.

godplant, you do not have a daylily. They do not come in pure white, and they are not a bulb.

You must have a easter lily (corm)

Tom,

Let's not get too excited about what taxonomists say. I have read of some wildly improbable crosses, and half-believe some of them. Gladiolus x Hippeastrum is on record, but I doubt that one.

Many families are not as well delineated as one might expect. Some genera and species don't fit one family any better than one or two others.

And sometimes crosses take, but the offspring are not quite hybrids. There was quite a controversy over reported hybrids of Paphiopedilum and Phragmipaphium. The chromosomes appeared to be entirely maternal, but there were definite traces of the pollen parent. More recently there have been enough of these "impossible" hybrids to remove most doubts.

Burbank reported hybrids of Lilium pardalinum and some Alstroemerias -- from different families. Since the plants had neither the bulbs of the lily parent nor the thickened rootstocks of the alstroemeria, they did not survive the winter.

Partial hybrids are becoming better known, along with the mechanisms that make them possible. Contrary to earlier opinions (often repeated in textbooks) chromosomes can form crossovers in somatic tissue, especially when there is a shock. The introduction of a pollen nucleus into a foreign ovum can be shock enough to get the chromosomes transferring bits to each other. Then, if the chromosomes of the two parents don't replicate at the same rate, all or most of those of one parent will be left behind. Often these are the chromosomes from the seed parent (along with introduced segments from the pollen parent), but sometimes the pollen parent's chromosomes are all that remain.

And then, in some cases, the chromosomes double up before the embryo emerges from the ground, so we aren't aware of what happened. In other cases, particularly in grains, the chromosomes don't double up. E.g., oats x maize seedlings are often haploid oats, though now and again a plant turns up with one or two maize chromosomes. Strains have been developed with full sets (hexaploid) of oat chromosomes with a pair of maize chromosomes.

The current crop of systematists (classifiers) are not particularly concerned with "crossabilitity" when they define species, genera and families. They aren't too interested in partial hybrids, either. These things are too messy for the modern academic taxonomist. There loss!

Karl King