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Ryan Whisney, of Council Bluffs, will be the speaker at the Central Iowa daylily Society meeting this Saturday. Whisney began hybridizing daylilies about 15 years ago. Before that he had grown flowers of many kinds with his parents and grandparents on the family farm, but it’s when he moved to Omaha to work for the Henry Doorly Zoo that he discovered daylilies. When he saw a line of daylilies that were slated to be torn up and thrown away, he noticed on the top were a couple small seed pods. Taking them and doing some research on how to start them, he put them in the fridge in a damp napkin in a little plastic baggie, and an obsession was born. From that one experiment, three seeds out of eight sprouted, and of those three seeds, two plants grew for him. One actually grew all the way to blooming size. It turned out to be a very dark daylily bloom with a fiery orangish red center coming out of it and that’s where it all started.
The next year he found a few pages on Facebook and started making connections. It was after joining the Nebraska Daylily Society and talking to David Hanson that he became enthralled with "toothed" (fringed) daylilies, and wanted to try to make his mark in the daylily world by hybridizing for teeth. Since those early days, and many, many trials and tribulations, Whisney now has three introductions in the American Daylily Society, and is slated to name and introduce six more either this fall or in the spring. This program should appeal to daylily hybridizers, especially beginning hybridizers and will give the daylily lover some insight into how daylily colors and forms come about.
The program is at 2 p.m. on Sept. 19 at the ISU Extension office at 2608 S. Second St. It is free and open to the public. More info, contact skycutter@heartofiowa.net.