Hi Melissa,
The first thing is that you are assuming that when a judge gives a name to a bloom in a show where the exhibitor doesn’t know it, they are “well-meaning” but ignorant of the identity. You believe that they are giving “made up names” with “probable inaccuracy”. That is not usually the case, and I say that with many years of being a judge and a judge instructor behind me. We are aware of the cultivars that have been in this country for many years and what the bulb distributors have used as substitutes. You do have to have a broad knowledge of cultivars and their differences to be able to do this with accuracy. I would agree that not everyone has this, but many do. If we do not know the name, we advise the person not to exhibit it.
Let’s just take a 1 Y-Y for instance. ‘King Alfred’ has a rolled and expanded mouth on the corona and the petals are quite twisted. It also has poor substance. ‘Unsurpassable’ has much more substance, a similar cup but the cup is narrower than K.A. at the base. ‘Golden Harvest’, another look-alike, has less twist to the perianth and the mouth is wider and is flared, not rolled. So if you are presented with a 1 Y-Y and it has one of these groups of characteristics, you could give it a name with some accuracy – knowing that these characteristics do not change substantially from one bloom to another.
I just feel that instead of banishing an unnamed flower to the unknown class, where it usually does not get judged and no awards are given, it is better to have it in the regular classes, where it could possibly get a ribbon. What gets the new exhibitor to come back next year? It is winning a ribbon!!! They could win one, since they would enter in the small growers classes where the competition is not so fierce. And! If we are really dedicated to making it easy for new exhibitors to enter our shows, we would say to that person that we will give them a 1Y-Y from our own garden, which is newer and more likely to win a blue ribbon, for them to grow and enter next year. Along with several other ones for them to try.
When I first joined the local daffodil society, the Membership Chair, Cecile Spitz, would invite new members to her garden, show them the wonderful things they could grow, give them many bulbs, make sure they knew how to plant and cultivate the bulbs and make sure they picked some to enter in the show and then supervise what they did to enter them. She never gave up on us. Should we do less? This is the real solution to the problem. It is not unnamed flower classes.
Donna
Dear Donna:
I entirely agree that special classes for unnamed blooms are the wrong way to go, and I support display of all blooms brought to the show. What I suggest is the practice of having "unknown" be just as respectable a name as any other, as is the case in many other countries. As has been pointed out to me by one eminent hybridizer in private response to this thread, the reason that many unnamed seedlings go unregistered is precisely that they so closely resemble some other existing cultivar. This puts even the most experienced eyes in peril of error. Considering that, along with the fact that a given cultivar can vary from garden to garden and year to year, it would be hard for me to accept the infallibility of even the best informed judge or exhibitor at naming the arbitrary cultivar without sure knowledge of its lineage.
Since we have objective criteria for placing daffodils in certain color codes, and since those criteria are definitive at perhaps the 95% level, or better, the question (if our goal is accuracy) may reduce to whether one would more likely misname a daffodil, or misplace it. I do support giving names to cultivars for which one feels absolutely certain of the identity; Fencourt Jewel or Magic Lantern might be examples. But then, neither of those is particularly likely to show up in a mixture of low priced bulbs. When some names are suggested to a prospective exhibitor and they say "Ah, yes, that is one I had," one can also be sufficiently sure to stick with the name. But mere resemblance, in styles where there are already large numbers of similar cultivars, does not guarantee correct identification, and I suspect that naming bulbs from mixtures is unlikely to yield correct results.
Perhaps some of the daffnet contributors who know more than I do about how mixtures are put together in various circumstances and locales can speak up on this topic.
I’d also like to hear some views of why it is better to incur the possibility of error from guessing at names, than it is to simply say "unknown".
Melissa
Let me add to the problem. What happens when a judge or judges “mistakenly” disqualifies a bloom for being mislabled (NAS)? Obviously, if the show is over it is too late to correct the mistake but I think we don’t want to be so arrogant in our knowledge of what the flower “should” look like. Can any judge truly differentiate between Actea and Pheasant’s Eye (or most poets – Mary Lou excepted) for that matter. Denis Dailey
Denis, you give me way too much credit on differentiating poets. Between Actaea and Pheasant’s Eye, yes, but I don’t know about the others. Mary Lou
As a judge, I say that the exhibitor should be given the benefit of a doubt, however, as has happened, If I find a ‘Rapture’ 6Y-Y in a collection of five Div 1, I will not judge it as a Div 1. In classes where I can, I try to have the Clerks place the exhibit into the correct category and class, but there is little you can do for the collection classes when one is obviously miss-labeled. Sometimes the miss-label is obvious, however, you are correct that many times the daffodil in question resembles a number of other daffodils and at that point is where I give the exhibitor the benefit of the doubt. A
sk Richard Ezell about ‘Liverpool Festival’ , or ‘Golden Amber’ two of the daffodils in the mid-atlantic region that are always being challenged as there are strong resemblance sto a couple other often exhibited daffodils.
clay
Clay Higgins
