Parentage

I suppose some may find this series of posts on daylilies tiresome, but there's a point to this.  Consider Jane Lough, the daylily which produced its first bloom yesterday in my garden.  This daylily was hymbridized by John Rice in 2001.

Jane Lough's parentage is: Fortune's Dearest x (Something Wonderful x Heavenly Companion).  This means that Rice bred a hybrid of Heavenly Companion, a peach-pink blend, with Something Wonderful, and then crossed the resulting plant with Fortune's Dearest.  Jane Lough was the result.

Something Wonderful (above) was crossed with
Heavenly Companion...

...and the result was crossed with Fortune's Dearest...

...which produced Jane Lough, shown in my garden.
Blooms mid-season with 5.5" flowers on 24" scapes,
beige with a violet blush, violet eye and edge,
and a yellow throat.

This past week I was mulling over why daylilies and their parentage fascinate me when I happened to watch an episode of the TV program, "Do You Know Who You Are?"  After three years on NBC, the series now airs Wednesdays on TLC.  Modeled on a program of the same name on BBC, this series invites celebrities to delve into their ancestry, sometimes with surprising results.

This week, for example, singer Kelly Clarkson discovered that her great-great-great-grandfather served in the Union Army during the Civil War.  He was captured, sent to Andersonville prison camp, escaped, and after the war returned to Ohio where he eventually became a state senator.

We all come from somewhere — or someones! — yet often our ancestors are all but unknown to us.  Time and again, it seems that people don't get interested in genealogy until they reach their 50s or 60s and feel their mortality more acutely.  Knowing this, we who are in our 50s and 60s ought to think about the information we could, and should, leave for our inquiring great-great-great-grandchildren!  If your grandchild wants to know about you, isn't that a good reason to be sure the information is available? •••