Identification of SeedEx seeds

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Dear Ken, Dennis and all,
You have seen the tip of the iceberg.

We get seeds for the SIGNA SeedEx from dozens of donors all over the world. We rely on the donors to provide a correct name for each donation.  We have had a few donations we felt were too far from accurate and we were tempted to throw these out, but this is not a desirable action.  We did not discard any seed this year.

We do list the donor in hopes of providing a hint on the 'authority' of species names.  Many seeds are impossible to authenticate.  If a donor is well known and reliable, but puts an odd name on a seed we tend to leave it; for example this year we have a hybrid labeled "lactea x typhifolia'. This is an odd and unlikely cross and the seed does not look like either parent, but the donor is a well known hybridizer of wide crosses. What should we do ? We chose to present it 'as is'.

In regard to the Iris lactea  chrysantha, these were donated by a Chinese botanist so we went with this as the ID.
Another Iris lactea from Tibet may also be var chrysantha, but the donor gave no specifics.

Even more vexing are the seed attributed to common cvs of Siberian, Spuria or Louisiana Irises, to name a few. They all look alike and are not likely to come true in any case. What should we do? We have thought about eliminating the "ex" and cv name and replace it with something like: dark blue cv, yellow cv, etc.  When there's 11 yellow spurias it gets crazy.

Bottom line is we reply on the ID of the donor unless either the seed is so obviously wrong or the donor is suspect or something else seems obviously wrong. Then what do we do with the seed: toss them out, offer them in "quotes", or ? . We certainly don't want to embarrass a donor, by listing their seeds with a negative association. We have all seen iris grown under the wrong name by the most well meaning of gardeners. Labels get mixed up.

We hope every seed is correctly identified when it is donated and we welcome unusual seeds. We'd also appreciate your feed back on how you think we should handle these.  Remember most of the seed come in non-transparent envelopes so we cannot easily verify even simple info such as number of seed or ID. And there are hundreds of packets to organize and list. Often we don't even get to see the seed until the donation envelope is opened for counting. If we are lucky enough to have a helper* to count seed, they might not see anything wrong with a seed that is too big, too large or odd to us.

Apologies for errors, of course, but these are mostly beyond our control.

Give us some feed back for improving the SeedEx.  Jim M. and Jim W.



* None of our SeedEx helpers  are members of SIGNA. There are no other local SIGNA members. We are grateful to have help from members of the Greater Kansas City Iris Society, friends and neighbors. Some are not even Iris growers.