RE: HYB: Fertility and chromosome count for Swertii please

Neil, I have a few ideas I've been tossing around. It is always very helpful and interesting to acquire information from more experienced irisarians. I am actually considering experimenting on both the diploid and tetraploid levels, room permitting. I am one who enjoys trying different things. Especially with the often times unpredictability of iris genetics, it makes for new, unusual, hideous, and sometimes useful crosses. It's those rare useful one's we all seek. And, knowing the length of time involved in waiting for results, there are always the fun "semi-sensible" crosses to keep us busy and in enough useful crosses to make an "out there" cross worth playing with.
Unless something has been done, and even when it has been done by others with iris, one always has room for that possible "something new" that makes hybridizing worth the time involved. With Swertii, like other cultivars, I have become interested in the lineage and possibilities from working with historics,  just for "fun".True, the best flowers come from the best parents and those are in my other plans, but all of those potential "new features" came from historics in addition to the many years of selecting "the best" cultivars to work with. Sometimes on purpose and sometimes quite by accident features have popped up. I guess I am more curious of the hidden recessives, etc that irisarians discarded, may never have seen, or simply overlooked back in the day.Not everyone has/had the same "perfect iris" in mind. And thankfully it's not impossible to add a new trait to an existing modern cultivar, if worth adding. Just challenging and time consuming...  Not exactly reinventing the wheel,
 just taking a closer look at it's development and how it eveloved over the years. Maybe I'll find something worthwhile in my ventures, maybe not. I will still enjoy hybridizing my cultivars and creating my own lines, etc, regardless of the outcome...
 
Now all I can do is wait for the deep freeze and snow to go away here in Minnesota...
take care and thanks!
 
steve m. -- zone 4b -- snow snow go away, come back another millenium --
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