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 _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>