Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 18:04:20 -0400 Sender: Daylily From: matthewkaskel Subject: Life After Rust Matthew Kaskel Homestead, Florida UDSA Zone 10 AHS Region 12 Dear Robin Members, THIS IS A LONG POST, but perhaps worth the reading... RUST HAS NOW ARRIVED at my garden here in Homestead, just south of Miami, Florida. When last week I went to speak to the Western North Carolina Daylily Club, I had not yet seen any evidence of rust. When I returned on Tuesday, there was some rust evident and now on Sunday, five days later, rust has now reached the furthermost edges of the garden. I am not suggesting that I brought the rust back with me from North Carolina, but rather the rust arrived in my absence. Actually, the garden had probably been inoculated with rust at some earlier time, but finally had conditions favorable to its spreading through the garden. I HAVE LONG BEEN CONSIDERING intentionally inoculating my garden with rust, but decided that I would wait until the end of the next bloom season before doing so. This is now a moot point. EVEN WITH ITS SHORT PRESENCE in my garden, I have made some interesting observations. First, I was surprised just how fast it spread. I had heard that some people have rust in some parts of their garden but not in other near-by areas. My garden is one large area and it is watered each night by an overhead irrigation system. I would guess that this helped the thorough spread of the rust spores. Also, we have strong winds blowing in varying directions. This, too, must have helped to thoroughly spread the rust. I HAVE YET TO FIND EVEN A SINGLE plant which is NOT infected with rust. This is what a number of people have suggested would be the case. Fellow robin member, Jim Lorton, mentioned in a post made yesterday to the robin, "As far as plant resistance, that's a hoot. The native plants are susceptible so while a tolerant or resistant plant is possible, it's not likely". WHILE I HAVE FOUND THIS TO indeed be the case, what is perhaps more important is the great variability in the damage done by the rust to various daylily cultivars. THE LEAST AFFECTED plants have rust damage ONLY on the very oldest leaves, the outside leaves. The damage is generally concealed from view in an established clump and the damaged foliage is almost entirely removed as you remove the dead and dying foliage in the course of normal garden grooming. THE MOST AFFECTED plants have damage to the oldest leaves and perhaps the oldest half of the living leaves. At the center of each fan the newest foliage is unscathed. But the "middle-aged" and old foliage, which makes up the bulk of the plants and is most easily seen by the viewer, is very damaged and very unsightly. These are the plants that make a rust infected garden a visual disaster. Most plants, however, are only SOMEWHAT damaged. I HAVE ALSO OBSERVED that there seems to be a correlation with the amount of rust damage to a plant and the general health and overall appearance of a plant. The plants having the healthiest appearing foliage, and plants having dark, bluish-green foliage seem to show the least rust damage. There are some "ordinary" looking plants in the garden which show virtually no rust damage, but in general there is a fairly consistent correlation between lush, bluish foliage and resistance to rust damage. SOME SPECIFIC CULTIVARS: Of my own introductions, the one with by far the "prettiest" foliage has long been GLAD ALL OVER. This was my first registration - a dull, creamy beige flower - round formed by the standards of its day, but I have not bred with it for a very long time because I have better flower colors with which to breed. But I have always admired the foliage. As you might guess, the foliage is virtually spotless, the only damage from rust being on the bottom-most leaves in the process of dying. Even with close-up inspection, it is difficult to see any evidence of rust. Another cultivar, TANGERINE HORSES, has very fine, bluish foliage. It, too, is virtually free of visible rust damage except on the almost concealed dying foliage. On the other hand, FIVE O'CLOCK SHADOW is greatly damaged on all but the very newest leaves. It is a mess. To my great dismay, I see that LACE COOKIES is rather seriously damaged as well. So too, are many of my favorite seedlings from LACE COOKIES. They are not as bad as FIVE O'CLOCK SHADOW, but plenty damaged still. More happily, IDA'S BRAID and most of my edged cultivars descended from it are almost totally undamaged. TWO PART HARMONY, a co-introduction of Dan Trimmer and myself is untouched in my garden as well as it was growing in Jack Kennedy's North Carolina garden. HOTCAKES is also almost unscathed in both gardens. ALTHOUGH I HAVE ONLY BRIEFLY SEEN the consequences of daylily rust in my garden, I have come to some conclusions and have made some decisions on how I go from here. I WILL NOT SPRAY my garden in an attempt to eradicate the daylily rust. I have heard and read how time and energy consuming and how costly is the battle against rust. It may be possible to have, temporarily, a garden truly free of infected daylily plants. But even if this were to be the case, a garden could easily be re-infected unless there were a continuous program of prophylactic protection. UNLESS AN INDIVIDUAL believes that rust might some day be totally ELIMINATED from all of North America - which now appears that be extremely unlikely - then that person must conclude that it will be a threat to our gardens for the foreseeable future and efforts to permanently sanitize a garden is an exercise in futility. I UNDERSTAND HOW THE COMMERCIAL daylily growers must currently keep their plants and gardens rust-free. But at the same time, I think that the effort is unsustainable and will shortly be unnecessary. I believe that most states in a year or two will downgrade the sanitation requirements for shipping daylilies so that a garden may not have to be totally free of rust, but merely that the bed from which the plant to be shipped must be free of rust. Or it may be that the individual plants to be shipped may have to be treated in some sort of a standardized method of sanitation before being shipped. FROM THE OBSERVATIONS I HAVE MADE in my garden and from viewing many of the 900 plus daylily cultivars growing in the garden of Jack Kennedy, I believe that there are PLENTY of daylilies already in commerce and in peoples gardens which are for all intents and purposes, virtually IMMUNE to the foliar disfiguring which appears to be the major adverse consequence of daylily rust. The spraying and sanitizing of ones garden CONCEALS the presence of the very plants which would be good stock with which to breed for daylilies which are less affected by daylily rust!!! I MAY LATER EAT THESE WORDS, BUT I BELIEVE that we can rather easily and quickly breed new daylilies which, though they be infected, are only slightly damaged by daylily rust. From observing the least-damaged plants in my garden and their progeny, I believe that relative damage-resistance is a heritable characteristic. If Mom and Dad are tough, so too are the kids! This observation comes not as a surprise, but actually the confirmation of such an expectation. Most other characteristics are heritable, so why not this one as well? I MADE ABOUT 70,000 SEED this year - a very large population - because I expected that I would have to make selections from among them for resistance to rust damage. Indeed, the seedlings which are now about six weeks old and still growing in communal beds, are totally infected with rust. But careful observation of even these little baby plants reveals that some are much more damaged than others. It is possible to identify the seedlings which are obviously very adversely affected and these are being discarded. Those with little or moderate observable damage are being kept. MY PERSONAL HYBRIDIZING AND SELECTING for damage-resistant plants has already begun. The breeding beginning in February 2002 will be done with only those plants showing a high degree of resistance to rust damage. Will I use dull, old, plain-Jane flowered GLAD ALL OVER - with its spectacularly damage-resistant plant habit - in my breeding? You bet I will! I will use it with other creams and the compatible godless and orange-family flowers. Of course not ALL, but SOME of the babies will have both the resistance to rust damage and pleasing colors. The others will be discarded. This is what hybridizers do!!! I WILL ALSO FIND MANY OTHER PLANTS growing in my garden which are suitable parents in a program seeking to breed for rust damage-resistant plants. I can already see that there are many available from which to choose. They are NOT all that rare! And, because there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of gardens across the country whose owners will NOT try to control rust, many people in the 2002 bloom season will observe and note which cultivars are rather resistant to rust damage in THEIR gardens. We now read the constant stream of anguished e-mails complaining of the arrival of rust to robin members' gardens and the difficult and frequently futile methods of controlling it. Well, in 2002 we will be reading upbeat and hopeful e-mails noting those cultivars which are performing in various gardens as if rust never existed. Because most of us are too circumspect to make a public comment discrediting the work of another person, we will be reading very little about those cultivars which ARE prone to heavy rust damage. Only if we are very still and listen very carefully will we hear the sound of these plants being quietly removed from our UN-sprayed gardens and pitched over our collective back fences. THE "GOOD" CULTIVARS, WHEN they are confirmed to be damage resistant by similar such observations in other gardens, will become the "core" plants on the new list of "Good Daylilies for the Post-Rust Age". These plants will be sold and traded and will gradually replace the rust prone cultivars. Gardens will be less and less adversely affected by rust as the years pass and soon enough will the whole topic will fade from its current prominence in our minds and our e-mails... HOWEVER..... SURELY ENOUGH, AS ALWAYS BEFORE, we will continue to breathlessly tear through our newly arrived daylily catalogs. And, as always we will recover from our breathless "Picture Shock". And too, we will recover from "Price Shock". But the new "next thing" we do will be to find out how strongly resistant to rust damage is our next new garden lovely. If this question cannot be answered, then many, many plants will remain protected from rust in our catalogs and not grown in our gardens. LIFE IS SHORT, AND I AM EAGER to get on with the hybridizing which I believe will define the daylily future. For this reason, I am happy to have this unwelcome visitor finally make its arrival in my garden. Now having arrived, it will have a home here forever. I will make no attempts to dislodge it, but will rather take advantage of it to identify those plants least affected by its presence. BUT AS MY GARDEN IS INFECTED with rust, so too are my planned 2002 introductions. Though I am able to treat them, it seems there may be no quick and assuredly effective way to rid these plants totally of rust. For this reason I am postponing the introduction of these plants. I will not mail out my usual year-end catalog offering my new introductions, nor will I sell plants of my previous introductions. Some of my proposed introductions I now see are rather prone to rust damage, and these will be discarded. Happily, others of my 2002 collection and many of my proposed future daylily introductions are rather resistant to the ravages of rust. I WILL GO ABOUT MY HYBRIDIZING and hopefully soon enough will once again be able to offer exciting daylilies which people will wish to grow in their gardens - their "Post Rust Gardens". Sincerely, Matthew matthewkaskel@kaskelfarms.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 19:09:17 -0500 Sender: Daylily From: matthewkaskel Subject: Problems in Breeding for Tolerance Matthew Kaskel Homestead, Florida AHS Region 12 USDA Zone 10 Dear Andre Gaboriau & All Robin Members, YOU MADE MANY USEFUL COMMENTS in your recent post to the Robin regarding the problems in breeding for rust tolerance in daylilies. Here, I have selected the portions of what you said which are relevant to this post: "What can be the solutions ? ...Doing what Pat Stamile suggests, and what Matt Kaskel has started. Leaving all the seedlings exposed, keeping the most tolerant and start the breeding program on them. In the case you get, in all your best lines, some more tolerant ones, select them and breed with them, that would be the dream solution and everyone will be more than happy.... ...what will you do with your best and most promising lines or with any beautiful plant which is not tolerant at all, and even when you are eventually at a danger to loose it.... ...To avoid this you MUST have 2 parallel programs. One strictly for tolerance and the other to keep or improve the advance and merge them to include the tolerance in the valuable non tolerant ones. By that I mean you keep a protected breeding program for improvement of the general characters, for the untested but most promising lines, which you absolutely do not want to loose." I HAVE FOUND MYSELF CONFRONTED with the same problems that you have explained and this is what I am doing: FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS,I HAVE divided my hybridizing efforts into a number of separate categories or daylily types. One category is the "Landscape" daylily. Here I am trying to develop a plant suitable to commercial and residential landscape purposes, where year round performance and appearance is very important. In this type of use, the overall plant habit and performance is most important - good color, pleasing mounding habit, sturdy, heavy arching foliage and so forth. The individual flower blossom on the plants is much less so. I have been selecting for some generations for this good overall plant habit It now seems, in my own observations, that rust tolerance tends to be found in plants with these general characteristics. Because I have been breeding this type of daylily for a number of generations and SELECTING FOR THE CHARACTERISTICS, I now have a lot of plants that embody these characteristics. Amongst these are many plants that have shown only a minimum of damage from rust, even this autumn when rust had a roaring flare up in my garden. Here, Andre, I am close to your "dream solution" and think that though rust will be always present in these plants, the damaging effects will be unobtrusive. LESS HAPPY IS MY PROGRESS with the large flowered "Round & Ruffled" style daylily. Though I have also bred this type of flower for many generations, the primary selection criteria has always been the beauty of the individual flower. Say what you may about the overall plant, what has always been compelling is the flower and this is what has guided my hand when pollinating. Yes, I have always looked at plant habit, but when a choice had to be made, regard for the flower has almost always prevailed. Because of this, the plant habit under some of the prettiest of my "Round & Ruffled" flowers is sorely lacking. There is nowhere near the good conformity and garden manners in this line of breeding as there is in my "landscape" daylily line. Alas, so too is rust far more prevalent in this line. I do have one plant - one of only a handful - a pale orchid with gold edge - that seems to be very rust tolerant. This will be a heavily used parent this next season - not just on orchid colored flowers, but on flowers of many different colors - and will hope to produce a good number of more tolerant plants for my "Round & Ruffled" breeding. BUT, ANDRE, AS YOU HAVE suggested, in my "Round & Ruffled" flowers, I have to have TWO PARALLEL programs. The first will be the breeding with my most rust tolerant pollens on more rust prone plants to make a generation of plants which hopefully will embody the good tolerance of the tolerant parent AND the beauty of the rust prone parent. The problem lay in the occasions when I want to breed two flowers together and each plant is highly susceptible to rust. In this second of the two parallel programs to which you allude, I will go ahead and make the (rust prone x rust prone) cross, expecting that the seedling will also be highly rust susceptible, but hopefully prettier or more advanced than either parent. I will have to go ahead and do a LOT of this kind of breeding this next season simply because I lack sufficient rust tolerant plants with which to work. Hopefully, in a generation or two, I will have generated enough rust tolerant plants with which to work and can go ahead and "merge" the programs - just as you have suggest be done. NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD PLANNED to be doing in daylily breeding at this point in my life, but rust has reared its ugly head, and so this is what lay before me on my plate!!! So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.... Sincerely, Matthew matthewkaskel@kaskelfarms.com