Hooray for you, Walter! All that sounds wonderful, except the bit about the aged parent, and one can relate.
I'm excited about your work with tectorum. It's a wonderful species, gorgeous and interesting. Peope; who don't value a plant unless they can suffer for it don't mess with tectorum much because provided you don't mess with it much, it will carry on forever. I wish mine set more seed but I always seem to get rain at the wrong time. The seed remains viable for several years, of course,
About gatesii: I've done research the past few years on the period, 1850-1930, give or take, and it is amazing what was in trade. However, most of the remarkable species from the Near East were, apparently, wild collected. The watershed on availability was WWI, although some lines had begun drying up before that time.. There were unpleasant collateral effects of the War which impacted gardens. Some species which had been available by the thousands, simply became unavailable, not only because of changes in Federal import restrictions, or refusal to support the Dutch in return for their wartime activity, but because the indigenous peoples who had previously collected the plants from the wild---- in Armenia, for instance--- were no more.
Cordially,
AMW
-----Original Message-----
From: Walter Pickett <walterpickett@yahoo.com>
To: iris-species <iris-species@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Fri, Jan 4, 2013 2:36 pm
Subject: [iris-species] Iris seeds germinating
It has been a long time, much of a year if not more, since I ordered some old I. tectorum seeds from the SIGNA website.
Then things went bad, my mother turned 99 and is not mentally what she was a year ago, and other things occupied my time.
But about 3 months ago, I retired and started trying tissue cultuer culture, along with my older brother, and I finaly got to where I was willing to risk some iris seeds.
I. tectorum is one that the seed list never runs out of, and it is something I have been interested in chromosome doubling and crossing with TBs. So I. tectorum was what I decided to start with.
I sterilized some seeds about a month ago and put them on sterile tissue culture medium, MS medium gelled with agar. I used my oldest seeds, 25 of them, 5 to a jar. Yesterday I saw that 6, from 3 different jars are germinated. There has been no contamination in any of the jars. This is a big deal to me, as getting good sterilization, without killing the seeds or plant material I've been using, has been my problem.
In reading through the back issues of the Signa and ASI publications, I have found that several people used to do sterile seed work, both to double chromosomes and to just get germination with difficult crosses. It isn't so common any more.
Anyone who does want to do this sort of thing should check out the home tissue culture group. It is amazing how this has progressed since I last tried embryo culture about 1978. Or I supose yuo could wait until I publish my results, but that means waiting a while, maybe another year. But things are finally moving along here.
I am about to start germinating my precious oncyclus seeds, and start trying to double chromosomes of I. tectorum.
Walter Pickett
