Due to numerous complaints about daylilies (not Rural Roots') included is a short item on tissue culture daylilies. You cannot tell a tissue culture from a field grown when you purchase it and some retailers are saying their daylilies are field grown when they were originally tissue culture.

Tissue Culture plants are produced in a laboratory by taking a few cells from a mother plant and developing plants in a test tube. This cloning process is a fast and inexpensive way to produce large numbers of plants in a short time. Most garden centres and plant catalogue operations are now selling tissue culture daylilies because the markup is so great. When one sees expensive daylilies being sold at bargain basement prices, this is often a clue that the daylilies have been tissue cultured. However this is not always the case. Sometimes these daylilies are priced as expensively as the field grown varieties.

The problem with these daylilies is that they are often do not look or perform like the original cultivars. Mentors of mine, Anne and Don Martin formally of Cedar Ridge Gardens while living in Bobcayeon did a trial with four different tissue culture daylilies and the results were most unsatisfactory. Orchid Candy died, El Desperado had a very tiny flower unlike its parent, David Kirchhoff was totally off colour, and Big Smile was not what they would consider vigorous.

From listening to many dissatisfied customers who have purchased tissue culture daylilies elsewhere, and form the poor results of tissue culture daylilies in the tests done by the Ontario Daylily Society and others, Rural Roots Gardens will only grow and sell field grown varieties that are NOT tissue cultured.