The Ralph W.

Wheeler Hybrid Daylily Collection

Anne Barrett
Jay Chang
Pam Lach
Alexandria Marder

About the Collection

Daylilies (genus hemerocallis; at least 13 species identified) have been around for thousands of
years, but at the beginning of the 20th century there were only a few varieties in America. In
the 1930s to 1950s, interest in daylily hybridization exploded. Hybridizers competed not only to
develop prettier daylilies with larger, more colorful flowers, but also to strengthen the plants
and coax them to bloom longer. Daylily hybridization turned into an industry of its own, and by
the 1950s gardeners were registering hundreds of new hybrids each year (Davis, 1954). One of
these pioneering hybridizers was Ralph W. Wheeler, of Winter Park, Florida.

 Wheeler (1880-1963) was born in New York and attended Amherst College from 1902 to 1906.
In 1925, Wheeler moved to Florida, where he developed an interest in gardening and
hybridization, working first on amaryllis before being introduced to daylilies in the mid-1930s.
In 1940, Wheeler showed his first hybrid daylily at the first ever flower show devoted to the
hemerocallis. The publicity resulting from the awards he received for 'Ruby Supreme' (best in
class and first class certificate) inspired a commercial demand for his flowers, and he started
selling them, although he continued to think of his hybridization work as a hobby (The
Hemerocallis Journal, 1957, 112-14).

Over the years, he continued to register more hybrids, which continued to win awards from
gardening societies and popularity with the general gardening public. Throughout his career, he
took slides of many of his hybrids in order to create a lasting record of his work. After his death
in 1963, Wheeler passed his collection of slides on to his granddaughters, who preserved them
along with newspaper clippings, books, and gardening medals.
 
The Ralph W. Wheeler collection today consists of 1 American Hemerocallis Society medal, 83
slides of daylilies, 5 photographs of Wheeler, 10 photographs and negatives of daylilies, 2
photographs of gardening medals, 2 books on daylilies, 2 yearbook issues of the Hemerocallis
Journal (Volume 11, no. 2 and Volume 12, no. 2), 4 garden catalogs, 1 clipping from an Amherst
College alumni magazine, 9 newspaper clippings (including an obituary), and a hand-written
letter from a gardener to Wheeler’s daughter just after his death. All items exist in boxes at
present, but will be digitized over the course of the project. The collection needs to be
organized and packaged so it can be handed over to Wheeler's granddaughters, who hope to
present the collection to a local history society or gardening society.
 
The unit of analysis will be the digital image, whether of a slide, a newspaper clipping, or a
photograph. Each image will be described according to our organizational system so it can be

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accessed on our website. The organizational system will need to account for multiple types of
media, although they will all be converted to digital images.
 
The items in the collection have connections to gardening societies and local and family history.
The general field of knowledge in which the collection falls is horticulture, particularly daylily
hybridization. It is not a strictly scientific collection; it will be of interest to historians of
horticulture and daylily enthusiasts, too.
 
Some of the descriptors we will need to include are:
 type of item (slide, photo, article, medal, etc.)
 name of hybrid
 color of blossom
 date of development
 hybrid origins (which plants were crossed to produce the hybrid)
 size of plant
 existence of plant (some hybrids still exist, while others have died out)
 any prizes award to the hybrid
 general notes about item, including dates of newspaper clippings and letters and further
information about hybrids

Users
Due to Ralph W. Wheeler’s status as an alumnus of Amherst College and as a specialist in lily
hybrid forms, the cataloged version of the Ralph W. Wheeler Collection will be made available
for members of the family (granddaughters, etc.), members of the academic community
(students/professors), members of the local gardening community (gardening societies and
master/amateur gardeners). The goal would be to make the collection available to as wide an
audience as possible. Additionally, the collection could prove valuable to a historical society
within the locality where Wheeler worked as well as Amherst College.

Naturally, different groups of users would go to the cataloged collection for different
information needs. Some users would simply require information regarding color of blossom or
availability of bulbs. Other users would require species names, size, zone, etc., while others
would wonder what kinds of awards are associated with the lilies. However, wise organization
of the collection, as well as varied searchability and interactivity, will aid all users in
accomplishing their information needs.

Eventually, as the collection has been digitized and organized, the collection will be returned to
the family for maintenance and keeping. There may be future possibilities in donating the
collection to an unspecified institution. Our goal is to provide as much information, smartly
organized, as possible regarding the collection. That way, any future institution to use it can
simply streamline the information—on the basis that it is much easier to trim something down
than to elaborate on what is already available.

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Ideally, the system would consist of an on-line catalog that would be searchable by keyword.
Additionally, a person could browse the collection, sorted by different classifications. For
example, one could browse all the hybrids sorted chronologically, based on when they were
created. It is assumed that the user would have an interest in lilies or Ralph Wheeler or
Amherst College or horticulture. Beyond that, no scientific knowledge-base would be required
to use the collection and its associated organizational system.

The Ideal System

The ideal system for organizing this collection is an on-line interactive catalog. Not only would
this be a repository for the digital files, but it would ensure that the collection is accessible to as
many users as possible. Each hybrid daylily, along with its associated metadata, would be
stored in the catalog database to enable simple queries and searches based on multiple factors.
Users could search for various Wheeler combinations, as well as find information about
whether the particular hybrid is still available and whether it garnered an award, or learn about
unsuccessful hybrid attempts.

The catalog would have multiple searchable fields; the primary search function would be based
on the various flower combinations via a controlled vocabulary (a pre-determined list of
keywords) query. Users would be able to select from a complete list of each possible daylily
with which Wheeler experimented to find every possible hybrid. Each search would bring up a
page consisting of the hybrid and its associated metadata: a digital image of the slide, its
species name, the year it was created, its basic color scheme, whether it is still available for
purchase/planting, any awards it won. Ideally, we would like to include a GIS component to the
database, so users could see where the flower was created and in what zone(s) it could be
planted. Users would also be able to search via any of these associated metadata fields; so, for
instance, users could search for only award-winning hybrids, or only those created in a certain
year.

Since the catalog would be online, we would develop a website that could link to Wheeler’s
alma-mater and whatever institution would eventually host the site, as well as link to the
American Hemerocallis Society homepage. We could include a feature that would help users
locate local daylily or gardening societies, as well as links to local garden centers (based on zip
code-specific searches).

Ultimately, this interactive catalog is similar to, but expanded upon, the American Hemerocallis
Society (AHS)’s online daylily database. Work could be done to integrate, or at least link, the
two databases. The Wheeler hybrid catalog would be a welcome addition to the more basic but
comprehensive daylily database, which provides a picture and essential flower information
(height, bloom, growing season, etc.) for over 67,000 varieties. Our catalog would be accessible
to those who have little or no knowledge of the species (the AHS database does not rely on
controlled vocabulary, so for users who do not know a particular cultivar name or hybridizer,
the experience can be overwhelming). And ours would be of greater use to historians and
botanists.

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Challenges and Concerns
We anticipate a few challenges in organizing this collection and designing its organizational
system. To begin, we are working with a finite collection. Because the available information and
materials may be limited, we can only work with what we have access to. In addition, limited
knowledge in the fields of daylily hybridization and horticulture in general among group
members may be a challenge when analyzing, describing, and organizing slides by scientific
characteristics. Resources on the web and personal contacts knowledgeable in the fields may
be of assistance to us.

Also, we defined various potential user groups and their needs. Because the design of the
organizational system is heavily user-driven, it may be helpful to narrow the system based on a
selected target group(s). Questions we may ask to select these groups are: What groups would
benefit from the organized collection and system? Would this collection be more useful to
certain user groups? Determining a method of organization that would accommodate the
needs and be user-friendly to various groups may take assessments of numerous target group
needs and be time consuming.

Because of the nature of the collection, we have determined that the system would most likely
not acquire additional material in the future. Still, in cases of newly-discovered items related to
the collection, we would create a system that allows the future owners/managers to make
additions to the existing structure. Finally, we may face technological challenges in the
digitization process, particularly with respect to the quality of digitized slides. Once we begin
the digitization process we will have a better sense of the scope of this potential problem. Of
course there will be unexpected challenges as we begin organizing this collection, but we are
prepared to address such issues as they arise.

Works Cited
Davis, Ben Arthur (1954). Daylilies and how to grow them. Atlanta, GA: Tupper and Love.

The Hemerocallis Journal (1957), Yearbook Issue.