Calochortus hybrids
Kipp McMichael (Fri, 08 May 2015 16:30:04 PDT)

...sigh: Our mailing lists munges another bullet list in an email.

Do we really still need to exclude even basic html markup from our list? Text-only email readers are a bit old-school to constrain the mailing list as of 2015, right?

But back to my reply:

In principle, any Calochorti with the same chromosome count can
hybridize (C. luteus and C. superbus are just one example of this). If
you want to avoid hybridization in your garden, you must prevent
pollinators from spreading pollen between compatible flowers.

This can
take the form of:
- only growing the plants in a pollinator-proof
enclosure
- removing the pollen producing organs from each flower as they
open (but you won't get mature pollen this way)
- covering each flower with
a mesh hood that excludes pollinators (some of which can be tiny)
- only
collect/grow species with:
- different chromosome counts
- different bloom times

-|<ipp