I don't actually have real documentation for any of my daylies excepting Storm Shelter and Stolen Treasure: all other names are guesses! But with that caveat aside, I think there's a decent chance these flowers are actually a 1955 cultivar called Frans Hals which according to the American Daylily Society is a midseason-to-late (check) 24" (yeah, that sounds right) “[b]right rust and orange bicolor, creamy orange midrib on petals”, yup.

Its parentage is labelled as a Baggette × Cornell and the breeder is Flory.

Granted, mine have more of an orangey yellow rather than the bright yellow petal as in the photo in their database, but in the garden thread where folks were posting pix of their favourite old daylilies, their Frans Hals looked just like mine. And several people had them, showing the persistence of this cultivar.

As I documented in amongst the oldest of my garden photos my first garden came with the beautiful lemon yellow ‘Hyperion’, but I wanted the traditional species, the ditch lily I saw growing feral, the plant I put in a patch design that actually won me a free bike tour. So I bought a couple! (Well, I was a beginning gardener back then;)^[1]

So I was actually kind of disappointed that my regular ole “orange” daylilies ended up being two different bicolors! One was a lemon and garnet bicolor that is almost certainly the 1949 Howdy; the bicolor shown here could be any number of orange and rusty red bicolors from the 50s, but Frans Hals is the only one that comes even close photographically—most of the others are so obscure there is no picture; whatever it is, it needed to be common enough to be sold cheaply in some big retailer's garden department in the late 80s.^[2]

Gifts from my friend Anne S formed the basis of a daylily “collection”^[3] , so I kept this one as a sort of second tier, because I just didn't think the color was that thrilling, but after photographing these—and to be frank, I do think they look great in the pix!—I decided it was time to put something I actually really liked in their place, as spots sunny enough for daylilies are becoming ever more scarce.

So, after thoroughly documenting them, I ripped them out.

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Sylvus Tarn