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Mutated flowers propagated from seed | ||
The most exciting in Hepatica breeding is for me to cross pollinate and produce new plants from seed, whatever it is the single or the filled flowering. Some years ago I thoght that only a miracle could give filled flowers from seed, but in the meanwhile I have learned, that we if nothing else, at least can help the miracle on track. To get filled flowers from seed we must have parent plants ith filled genes, both the mother and father if possible, but mostly we must be content with one of the parents with filled genes.
The material tp rpoduce filled flowers from seed is
different when talking japonica and nobilis, so let's start with
japonica.
JAPONICA:
By H.japonica the mother plant can be the types Nidan-zaki, Nichirin-zaki, Chuouji-zaki or Karako-zaki. You can read more about the different flower types in Subdivision in types These four types all have filled genes and at the same time pistils and can because of thes be used as mother plants. The father where we must keep the pollen is the singleflowering Hyoujunka (you can be lucky that the Sandan-zaki type produce anthers and pollen, and if so of course must exploit this, and you can have filled genes from both the mother and the father, but this is not normal). The seeds/plants we get of this crossing is called F1 which means first generation. Mendel's law of genetics tells that plants with single flowers has a dominant gene, while plants with filled flowers has a recessive gene. It means that when our F1 plants inherit one single flowering gene from the father and one filled flowering gene from the mother, then our F1 plants will have single flowers (=the dominant gene). We now have F1 flowers with both pistils and stamens with pollen and
at the same time they have a filled gene, and we can go on working with
these.
As mentioned before the main rule is that F1 plants
will have single flowers - but no rule without excptions, and
somtimes you can have filled flowers in first generation. This is due to
a double up of genes by nature, and our F1 plants can inherit more genes
from both the mother and the father. The more genes, the more
unpredictable and exciting is the result - depending how lucky we are
that more filled genes will hit each other. NOBILIS: JAPONICA X NOBILIS: Most of the crossings between japonica and nobilis (or nobilis x
japonica) are fertile even a few are sterile. A good advice: Breeding and
procuce your own crossings are incredible exciting. To choose the
parents and imagine what comes out of the relationship, I think talkes
to a very big part of plant people. That the result not always match the
expectations we must just accept. Hepatica lends extremely well to attemt crossing because it is variable and fairly quick to come into flower, often already two to three years after planting. |
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