About Us

About Us







I am first and foremost a hobbyist who enjoys breeding and growing daylilies and other plants. I enjoy both the art and science of breeding plants, creating family lines with reliable breeding uses and watching the turning of the generations as desired traits become fixed, stabilized and intensified within those lines. My decision to begin to sell daylilies is based on the fact that I want to share my own breeding work with other breeders who can also make use of my selections within their programs. As well, there is the fact that in testing and selecting for base-breeding plants from other hybridizers programs, both old and new, I have amassed a number of cultivars and species clones over the years that I have found to have exceptional traits in my garden, in my breeding program or both. Most of these have been exceptional for me for both garden traits and breeding qualities.

For that reason, I want to distribute both my introductions and these selected plants from other hybridizers to gardeners and daylily breeders who can make use of them in their breeding programs or just grow them for their good plant traits or interesting flower qualities in their yards and gardens. However, I have no desire to make a huge business, shipping thousands and thousands of daylily fans each year. I intend to stay small and let this just be a hobby, both because I don’t need a commercial horticultural enterprise nor do I have the physical stamina to run such an endeavor. I plan to have a small shipping window in the spring and in the late summer/fall of each (most) years. I will take orders through my Sun Dragon Daylilies website for one or the other of those windows, while supplies last (and most things here, even common older things, tend to be in small quantities because I am not trying to multiply them into long rows and massive fields). I may from time to time list individual plants for sale, especially things in very small quantities, on the Sun Dragon Daylilies Facebook page, The Lily Auction or The Blooming Auction. If I post something on either of the later, I will post about those auctions on the Facebook page.

My own cultivars may not be released the year they are registered as cultivars with the AHS. For any number of reasons, I may choose to wait to release my own registered cultivars for a year or more. This will mostly depend on available quantities. Please remember that my own introductions for the next few years will be heavy in my own base-stock breeders and thus I may choose to test them further before releasing them or may need to hold them back for breeding purposes. I will try to make some of each new cultivar available in its first year, but I can’t assure that I will with all of them. I may also offer seeds from crosses involving my introductions either crossed amongst themselves or crossed to other hybridizer’s cultivars that I have found to be very useful. I will make a few crosses in 2017 to offer in the fall of 2017. By doing this, I may be able to share genetics of some of the things in very short supply through their pollen. (A little bit of pollen can go a long way, after all!)

With other hybridizer’s cultivars, I only sell things I really appreciate in one way or another, and usually for a combination of good traits. There are two main reasons I will offer another hybridizer cultivars - 1). I find it to be very good, I have built up a large amount and can share it without negatively effecting my own breeding work, and/or 2). I find it to be very good in some way(s) and have retired it from my breeding program after several years of use and testing. I will give some information on my anecdotal experience of growing and breeding from each cultivar I offer. The amount of information I have to share will vary, depending on how long I have grown it and used it, my results and observations and the information I have been able to gather from other breeders and growers. Most of my offerings from other hybridizers have also been used in my test matings to find the base plants for my own breeding program and so I have seen seedlings from many of them and can attest that they still have useful traits. While not all are the latest and great, the very cutting edge in terms of their flowers, a great many of these are still fundamentally important for building a base strain for breeding programs.


This blog is dedicated to making informational pages on daylily cultivars. Many of these I will also offer for sale on my Sun Dragon Daylilies website and through various auctions - both my cultivars and the cultivars from other hybridizers that I may choose to offer. However, when I no longer offer a cultivar, I will leave the informational page in place for your reference. It is not my goal to keep all the cultivars I offer as ‘stock items’ indefinitely. I may keep certain cultivars from other breeders because I find them to have great landscape/garden or breeding value and so will always want to have some around, which means I will also likely have some to offer, at least on a rotating cycle. Some things may be so popular and do so well in many locations that I want to make the effort to keep a constant stock. With others I may offer them for a time, but once sold out not seek to retain any of the plant for future use or offerings. That doesn’t mean I think such cultivars are bad. It just means I have to draw the line somewhere. I want to increasingly, as the years progress, focus on my own program and introductions and that handful of other hybridizer’s cultivars that I find indispensable and never want to be without.