Registration Q&A
A. Registration is the process of documenting the details about a specific cultivar. It is done by the AHS registrar (currently Elizabeth Trotter) under the guidelines developed and promulgated by the International Union of Biological Sciences, International Commission for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants as published by the International Society for Horticultural Science as the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants, often referred to as the ICNCP or Cultivated Plant Code. These guidelines are set forth as horticultural regulations detailing the rules by which a plant can be registered. The registrar does not have the right to waiver from these rules.
The year of registration is the year this plant was submitted by the hybridizer to the registrar. The new year begins on November 1 of one calendar year and ends on October 31 of the following calendar year. The registrar is required to publish these registrations in a hard copy publication, and only then are they officially registered, and the registration details can be posted on the AHS website.
This system allows one to have relatively certainty that when buying Cultivar ‘A’ in fact they have gotten Cultivar ‘A’. The AHS requires that any cultivar published in an AHS publication with a cultivar name be registered before being published. All AHS sanctioned shows require that any cultivar entered be formally registered. Also, all awards within the AHS are keyed off the registration date. Effectively, this is the only date the registrar is involved with.
A. By the regulations new registrations are not required to be publicly available until the 2025 registration process is complete and the totality of 2025 registrations are published first in hard copy which happens in the spring of 2026.
A. The publication of daylilies are published annually sometime between late winter to early spring. As of October 1, 2025, there are 103,716.
The registration records are archival only to those cultivars for which a registration application has been submitted. The very fact that the name that you use in the garden records say it is Voyle’s Unnamed Hybrid indicates that likelihood that by definition no application was ever filed for registration and thus there would be no record of it in the official International Registration database.
[Note: This answer also applies, in part, to the next question as well.] Registration is the process of documenting the details about a specific cultivar. It is done by the AHS registrar (currently Elizabeth Trotter) under the guidelines developed and promulgated by the International Union of Biological Sciences, International Commission for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants as published by the International Society for Horticultural Science as the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants, often referred to as the ICNCP or Cultivated Plant Code. These guidelines are set forth as horticultural regulations detailing the rules by which a plant can be registered. The registrar does not have the right to waiver from these rules.The year of registration is the year this plant was submitted by the hybridizer to the registrar. The new year begins on November 1 of one calendar year and ends on October 31 of the following calendar year. The registrar is required to publish these registrations in a hard copy publication, and only then are they officially registered, and the registration details can be posted on the AHS website.
All awards within the AHS are keyed off the registration date. Effectively, this is the only date the registrar is involved with.
Introduction dates (also sometimes called availability dates or release dates) are determined by the originator (hybridizer) of the cultivar and can be the same as the registration date but are not required to be. They are used for commercial purposes usually to establish the price of a cultivar. The longer a cultivar is available in commerce generally the lower the cost. The term .introduction. has no meaning or implications under the ICNCP.
The AHS requires that any cultivar published in an AHS publication with a cultivar name be registered before being published. All AHS sanctioned shows require that any cultivar entered be formally registered. If an unregistered cultivar is used as a parent in registering a later cultivar it must be registered under a seedling number and not an unregistered name. If a commercial garden enters a non . registered cultivar into commerce before it is registered, they take the chance the name will be rejected or taken by someone else before it is registered. Occasionally an older cultivar that has been in commerce unregistered and widely distributed gets registered long after it is introduced into commerce.
In the simplest terms, all the dates in the database are the date the daylily was registered (unless it says it a name reservation, in which case once the name is then used to register a cultivar the date becomes the registration date. Under the international code there is no introduction date, etc, but numerous hybridizers often registered his daylilies many years before introducing them to the market and they dated them as they wished.
The International Code itself has never accepted anything other than the registration date as valid for archival purposes. The term .introduction. has no meaning or implications under the ICNCP.
Only the originator or their legally designated agent may register a daylily if they are alive. If the hybridizer is deceased the registrar, and now through a specially designated committee, can take the information under advisement and if deemed appropriate may consider entering the cultivar into the registration database. If you know the hybridizer is alive you should work through them to get any changes made to the archival, registration database.
The past registrars had lesser quality technology to work with, and in the earlier days had nothing but a non-electric Smith-Corona typewriter, handwritten files, and the only way to search was by hand checking against a list. I am amazed there are not more than a dozen or so duplicates that we have found to date, and after 8 people have searched using modern techniques. Then there are rule changes that occurred allowing punctuation that had been previously disallowed in registered names These were allowed after the determination that search engines and databases could detect them sufficiently, but. . . where it is in one name and not another the check isn.t always perfect. And things like an apostrophe in one name and not in another has lead to many duplicate names.Past registrars “fixed” the problems by simply adding a number or year into the name. After I feel that we have found them all I hope to work with the ISHS and come up with an internationally accepted fix for the long term.