Re: Luminata genetics

Dave, you are not alone in needing to back away and give thought.

Being a disabled senior does have a few advantages.  It does mean that I have
a great deal of open time to read, dig into pedigrees, hunt down photos and so
on.

Over the early years I was breeding irises, starting in total ignorance in the
late forties, then beginning to keep records in 1953, I have made a rather
large number of bad crosses and a few good ones.  What I did not do during
that time was to focus my energies on a specific project or two, but sampled
everything instead, and did not really recognize it when I had something
especially good until too many years had passed, and by then I was deeply
involved in working in an agribusiness corporation, keeping a toe-hold in my
own family's orchards, and raising small children, two of whom required
special care.

Despite that, I had some rather thorough judge's training from Mary Tharp,
Melvina Suiter and Wilma Vallette, served as a garden judge for at least
fifteen years, as RVP of Region 11 for one year, then resigned as I did not
have the time to split my energies and attention that many directions all at
the same time.

The annual seedling crops got smaller and smaller, and finally somewhat more
focused, then stopped altogether when my life took a radical turn.  My family
and I pulled up roots and left the land behind an headed of into an
"ecclesiastical excursus" to quote one of my rather well-known contemporaries.
My involvement with iris did not resume until the late 1990's.

What I did observe during those early years includes--
    plicatas show up in the most unlikely crosses, although rarely
    some of my early crosses were clearly mislabeled or contaminated (so I
learned to be extraordinarily careful, pulling off the falls, using only very
freshly opened flowers, keeping seeds in packets so they could not get mixed
or spilled and so on....fastidious care pays!)
    other people's pedigrees could sometimes be taken with a grain of salt,
especially when things that could not possibly come from the published
ancestry of the parents showed up in my seedlings from extremely carefully
controlled crosses--one soon learned whose could be trusted absolutely (which
fortunately included most hybridizers), whose with high probability, whose
with caution, and whose not necessarily at all
    like usually breeds like, especially if one is considering serious
flaws--one does learn that the work of growing seedlings isn't worth wasting
on crosses from anything much less than the best of the best--unless one
especially enjoys hoeing lots of weeds in the hot summer sun
    it pays to build on the successes of others--and to study their pedigrees.
I read and re-read the annual R&I's, in those days sent to all the members
without extra fee--and read them with Check Lists and older R&I's in hand,
along with a lot of notepaper
    successful and important iris breeders were approachable and would almost
always answer a novice's questions with patience and sympathetic care--and
even on occasion offer breeder stock if they had reason to think the recipient
would make good use of them...Iris people have been astonishingly generous
with me, and many others of my contemporaries have said the same
   getting books and digging into genetics and studying books about heredity
pays
   so does keeping lots of records, seed counts, germinations, counts of type
in progeny and so on
   and being quick to admit I was wrong.  Being willing to back up a step or
two and starting over in a more productive direction applies quite well to
almost everything.  It applies especially well to breeding of iris.

Neil Mogensen  z 7 western NC mountains

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