Daylily Registration Q & A

A. Although some websites other than the AHS site have older versions of the form, and we have even experienced, from time to time, the old form slipping back into the AHS site, the only valid address is the one noted below.

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. If you received a message saying there were datasheets attached, those datasheets are the notification that they were registered. That is all the notification you will received that the cultivars were registered. If you have not received the datasheets the registrations have not been processed.

A. By the regulations new registrations are not required to be publicly available until the 2012 registration process is complete and the totality of 2012 registrations are published first in hard copy which happens in the spring; for 2012 that would be in 2013. Since I have been registrar we have put them in the online database as the volume of total registrations justified the time and effort to do so. Prior to that they were only updated online once a year AFTER the official hard copy publication.

Please note that 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 publication is usually published in the late winter/early spring timeframe.Thus, As registrations are not official until published in hard copy the number registered and published through and including registration year 2011 was 70,268.

The number of applications that are filed for registration has been averaging approximately 200 per month for the past couple of years so it would be safe to estimate subsequent increases in the number accordingly.

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.

Have you ever gone into a stadium filled with 70,000 plus persons and tried to find your 4 best friends. Now imagine the same scenario and you were asked to find 4 people you never met based upon pictures. Now imagine that with the knowledge that different models of cameras have tendencies to enhance different colors in different manners, and film also is made by different manufacturers to enhance different colors the colors you have may not be totally true.Shifting to flowers; now imagine you still decided to try, then you recognize that the pictures are taken so that the flowers fill the frame of the picture such that they all look about the same size and there is no ruler, or other measurement device to help distinguish the true size of the flower and the height of the flower off the ground.

Then you remember you are not aware whether the picture was taken in a draught or in an abundance of water, and whether they were heavily fertilized or never fertilized. And then you realize that you have no idea whether the plant is one year old or 20 years old.

These are just some of the factors that make it virtually impossible to identify flowers from pictures, and even with all the information above being available the probably of your being correct is less than 1 in 100 unless you have a perfectly identic memory. Your best bet is to go back to the source of where you received the plant and find out what they grew, or sold you that might match.

We allow free use of the images, but in exchange we want recognition of the AHS Cultivar Database as the source in exchange. For this reason, all the database images are watermarked. That said, there have been several versions of the watermark over the years. When time permits, there could be new versions in the future.Here is an example of the one now in use. ‘Abilene Tall and Lanky;

And here is the larger one that preceded it. We agreed it was too large. ‘A Day foe Doris’

And finally, here is the one from the old version of the online database. ‘A Bit of Apice’

Now, the problem is that there’s some work involved in replacing the old images to change the watermark. Right now our volunteers are working hard to add images for older daylilies, in the cases where we are allowed to do so. At this time I’d rather have them continue with this work than help us reprocess the images we already have.

Virtually every time that this question has been asked, and the registration records checked, in some cases taking upwards of an hour or more, the answer has been that there is no record of the cultivar ever being registered. This answer then results in many cases with the following question:

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.

As above, 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 making this correction. If you know the hybridizer is alive you should work through them to get any changes made to the archival, registration database.However, in over 50 percent of the cases where I received an email suggesting the picture was incorrect, and where the hybridizer was still alive and I further checked with them, especially where the picture says on it they submitted it with the name, they have said the person sending the email was incorrect, and, in fact, the picture was correct as it grew in the garden of the hybridizer. Often the reason for color variation is due to minerals either in or lacking in the soil, the amount of water allowing for the minerals to be taken up by the plant, the time of day when the picture was taken, the external temperature when the picture was taken, etcetera. This what you see is NOT always what you get, and may not be indicative of an error.

As noted with pictures above, only the originator or their legally designated agent may submit corrections to a daylily description 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 corrected information 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.

If you are entering John Doe, it is likely you will never get a search to work. The search looks at the data in the archival database of registrations and under the code the full names are not archived, nor are they archived first name or initial followed by the last name or initial. Using a real example of how the code works:Ra Hansen was the first Hansen to register a daylily with the last name spelled Hansen. Under the code, all her registrations are listed only as Hansen.

The next Hansen was Ra.s husband who was known as Pete, but signed the forms L. Pete, thus he became Hansen-L.P. to avoid confusion.

Dan Hansen was the next person with that last name to register a daylily and thus he is Hansen-D. for database purposes.

Next came David and Val Jean Hansen, (who are not directly related to Dan), under the code this could have gone several ways, it could have been done as Hansen-Da,-Hansen-V. or Hansen-D.&V. or Hansen-D.V. the choice made was Hansen-D.V.

In fact Dan has a brother David Hansen, and if he were to register a daylily we would start by suggesting he go by either Hansen-Da. or work with his middle initial say it was P. and he choose the alternative Hansen-D.P. instead of Hansen-Da.

If I do not know the code used for a person I have found the best way to do such a search is to ask for the last name .anywhere in the name. under the search options. Thus using Hansen, this gives me all the Hansens with their other .initials. and then I can narrow my next search to the right name if need be.

The short answer is NO! He is a Hanson with an ‘o’ and thus a search for Hansen will never bring up Curt, and in fact Curt is the second Hanson and is actually Hanson-C. in the database.

Again the easiest way is to start with the last name only and then see how they come up. The rules for registration when applied to dual registrants with different last names, or a situation where there is a hybridizer name separate from the registrant’s name is that the Hybridizer’s name should come first and the registrant second. Thus, Stamile-Pierce for Patrick’s plants registered and introduced by Guy Pierce, and similarly Stamile-G.-Pierce for Grace’s plants registered and introduced by Guy Pierce