Re: Glaciata

Paul Hill's quoting Keith Keppel's remarks in one of  last year's *Bulletins* is definitive in my understanding, although my experience of or with glaciatas is mostly confined to TB's.  I have and enjoy two of Keppel's SDB's that are glaciatas, but at casual glance, one would never know they were such.
 
That's not true with TB glaciatas.  For me at least, they are obvious from across the garden.  There's something about the clarity or quality of the color that just announces itself "Glaciata Here!."  Pulling down--or off--a fall makes the identification certain.  Those whisker marks that are *always* present in ordinary clones, no matter how clean the hafts, are simply not there.
 
How the carotinoid pigments are distributed or patterned is simply a different question.  They have nothing to do with defining or illustrating the "glaciata" status of the flower.
 
Glaciatas are at the extreme end of the plicata allelic series but *can* emerge from apparently non-plicata parents.  An awful lot of iris out there do carry plicata recessives and can pop up in the most unexpected crosses.  Whenever this has happened in my seedlings the plicata pattern has always been dull, the flower full of faults and so on.  Once or twice I made half-hearted pollenizations with them, or kept a seedling for a year, but ended up discarding them all.  Good plics come from good plics, and very rarely from stray segregates from other lines.
 
A marvelous contridiction to the above is AMERICAN CLASSIC.  The pod parent, Y 491-1, is a plicata "pop up" out of the Schreiner orchid line and the pollen parent is mostly Schreiner purples except for Rococo in the great-grandparent generation.  One would abruptly stiffen up in astonishment at the pedigree if it were not realized how widely the "pl" recessive series is to be found. 
 
It is of interest to note that some Keppel plicatas have some similar bloodlines involved as contained in Y 491-1.
 
Neil Mogensen   z 7  western NC
 
 

Yahoo! Groups Links
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index