Re: Disgusted
- Subject: Re: Disgusted
- From: h*@open.org
- Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 22:51:05 -0700 (PDT)
Ray:
>I would think the daylily people are struggling to come up with
>creative, likable names since there are 10,000 registrations.
Actually, it's over 40,000 and growing at the rate of about 1,600 a
year! Still, daylily hybridizers come up with interesting names. If
you were to look at all the major daylily catalogs I would think you
would only find maybe a thousand cultivars easily available
commerically. With some effort you could come up with a few more
thousand. However, don't lose the tags as it's almost impossible to
identify some of these once you lose the name. My estimate is that
50% of all registrations are vanity registrations. Of all the
daylilies that are registered every year I suspect that maybe 100 to
200 are actively sold. I don't think hostas are quite up to this
point yet!
Chick:
>People still do not agree whether Mayan Moon and Abiqua Moonbeam, or
>Guardian Angel and Angel Eyes are the same plants. When they came
>out, most people said that Mayan Moon and Abiqua Moonbeam were the
>same, but Alex grew them side by side and said they were different.
>We took three plants of Angel Eyes and three of Guardian Angel and
>grew them side by side in three different gardens in Wisconsin. One
>person said they were the same plant, one said that Guardian Angel
>was superior and the third liked Angel Eyes best.
This is something that interests me. I need to evaluate some of the
sports I'm picking up, but I think a lot of the sporting we see in
hostas is due to transposible elements. Depending on where the
transposible elemnts move to within the genome we can see a major
sport or a minor sport. In a major sport the sported offshoot is
significently different from the parent that we can easily recognize
it as a sport. However, if the "same" sport shows up in two different
gardens it could be that they really aren't the same identical sport
because the transposible element is in a slightly different location.
Consider this analogy: take a see-saw and place people along the
whole length of the see-saw. For this example lets assume there are
10 people on each side and one person in the middle and the weight on
both sides is evenly balanced. The person in the middle is the
biggest and heaviest. Lets call this case 1. For case 2 lets move
that big person to the far end of one arm of the see-saw and it will
tilt the see-saw so that arm of the see-saw is solidly resting on the
ground. We would clearly see these two see-saws as different,
although they have the same people on them. Now, for case 3,
consider that the biggest person moves far enough toward the end of
one arm so that that end of the see-saw almost, but not quite, touches
the ground. Now, someone comes along and looks at case 2 and then
case 3, but they can't see the difference between solidly resting on
the ground and almost resting on the ground, so they will say the two
are the same while someone else can see the speck of light between the
ground and see-saw and see them as different. However, if you are on
the other end of the see-saw does it make any difference? I think
something like this is happening in hostas. In some sports the
transposible elements are in the same location, so they are identical,
but in some sports the transposible elements are in almost the same
positions, but not quite. They look ever similar, but when grown in
different locations they may respond to the environment somewhat
differently, or some people might have good enough visual skills to
see the difference however slight.
For example, I am having some fun trying to seperate various
selections from Francee and various Francee sports like Patriot. Some
Francee's have lighter green leaves and some have very pale leaves.
Some have wider edges then others. Over the last two years I've been
trying to sepoerate out some of these minor differences to see what
comes of them. Last year I wrote "nice" on the lable of one of them,
and "large leaves" on another - both were small plants. This year the
one labled "nice" looks just like Patriot, except the edge appears to
be more yellow and the one labled "large leaf" just looks bigger and
nicer. I'm also trying to select out some with wider edges. All of
these need more evaluation before I can say anything conclusive about
them. What I next need to do is determine how stable they are when
planted and left alone and how stable they are under various
propagation techniques. Some of these selections with slightly wider
edges or larger leaves are minor sports that don't easily distinguish
themselves from the parent plant.
Joe Halinar
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