LOCH NESS MONSTER was one of the foundation plants in my hybridizing program.  This illustrated pedigree chart is from my presentation on hybridizing.  When I started my breeding program I would spend hours and hours in the old Checklist registry books researching daylily pedigrees.  I would use pedigree charts like the one scanned below (without the photos!) to record what I discovered.  My goal was to take the daylily clear back to the species if I could.  After researching enough cultivars I began to see patterns and began to get a sense of where certain traits may have originated.  Then I intermated plants with an eye to accentuating these traits.  Part of the hybridizer's gift is intuition, a gut feeling of what crosses will give us what we want.  Another very large part is research.  With the aid of the searchable databases now available that part is made much easier.  I would encourage any beginning hybridizer to spend many hours researching the pedigree of their potential breeding stock.  Seeing "what's behind" a particular flower is a vision into the future revealing what traits can be shuffled to the surface of the phenome via hybridization.