Wow.
This sounds about like breeding ball python color morphs. I think historians have concluded that Mendel himself airbrushed the data just a bit. So you're absolutely right: real life is a lot messier than the simplified version we're taught. As it is in every topic.
You've just summarized, in a few sentences, what is in my view a stunning amount of empirical observations, accumulated over a necessarily long time frame. It reminded me of Gene Crocker's decades-long work in Cattleya breeding at Carter & Holmes. In Japan, such folks are called living national treasures. No MS or PhD thesis could match this kind of thing because no one can spend decades in grad school (altho it sometimes seems like decades when you're actually doing it).
So my question is this: Would it be reasonable to prepare a talk on this, to be presented at some international symposium? Each slide with the two parents followed by a slide of a representative spectrum of the offspring? Is this something PBS should consider, either as a wiki page or as a candidate for support to get it published or presented to a wider audience? Yes, I know it's easy to come up with things someone else should do, but this knowledge cries out for wider distribution.
Just my opinion. Fell free to make it your own.
Bob Zone 7 where Lachenalias are coming to life...
On Friday, October 22, 2021, 12:28:48 AM EDT, Michael Mace via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:
Thanks for the nice comments and questions...
> Over the years which has been the hybrid you are most satisfied with, that
developed as you intended.
Almost nothing develops exactly as I intend. That's part of the fun.
When I started I was just experimenting around to see what would happen, so
I didn't have any expectations at all. Over time, I have been able to
develop some general rules on what each particular species will do to
hybrids, and how the colors combine. For example:
--Moraea tripetala often makes spotted hybrids, even though it is not
spotted.
--Moraea bellendenii often breaks apart the eye spot in hybrids, or makes it
multi-colored.
--Moraea villosa usually makes hybrids that look like M. villosa. But the
offspring of those hybrids can vary a lot.
--Moraea aristata usually doesn't pass along its colors to hybrids, but
often it makes them larger and more vigorous.
--If you cross orange and purple flowers you'll usually get flowers that are
slightly paler orange. Crossing that with a purple flower produces
interesting effects.
--Crossing spotted flowers does not necessarily make spotted flowers.
I can tell you that real world genetics are way, way more complex than what
they teach you in high school. It's hard to predict which characteristics
will be dominant or recessive, sometimes a group of characteristics seem to
be linked together, and often the genes seem to combine to do unexpected
things. It's enough to make you nuts, but I find it really interesting --
like an endless series of puzzles to solve. Every year's new flowers are
surprising.
>Which hybrid has been your biggest surprise?
One that shocked me was a cross between M. villosa and M. tulbaghensis.
Usually that produces bright orange flowers that are relatively small and
cupped. But this particular cross made one flower that was heavily spotted,
and another that had strange smoky stipples around the eye, like a sloppy
dose of eyeliner. I went out into the garden one day and literally did a
double-take at those flowers. You can see them here:
https://growingcoolplants.blogspot.com/2013/03/…
I still don't know why that happened, and I haven't been able to reproduce
that effect with other crosses of the two species. Unfortunately, I lost
those particular hybrids a couple of years later (when I repotted with a bad
batch of soil). But by then I had made a lot of other crosses with them, and
they led directly to many of the spotted and stippled hybrids that I'm
growing today.
> where do you have the room for so many crosses??
We got lucky. Our home has a huge sloping backyard, about 3/4 acre. It was
too steep to build a house on, which is why the developer included it in our
lot. I've been building raised beds on that hillside, one or two beds each
year.
> How many seeds of each cross do you typically get and sow??
The pods vary from just a couple of seeds to maybe a hundred. I plant about
a dozen seeds of each cross. I hold onto the extra seeds, and if I like the
flowers from a cross I'll dig out the original seeds and plant more.
> How much variation do you see among the seedlings of each cross??
For an F1 cross (two species) the seedlings usually look pretty much the
same. For crosses between hybrids, the variety can be very unpredictable.
> How long to first bloom?
Three to four years. Occasionally two.
Thanks,
Mike
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