Re: Re: AIS: question convention plant

Chiming in a little belatedly here  --  Our Region 4 recently hosted a
national convention, and I remember another that we hosted several years ago.
Although our volunteers did a huge and uncomplaining job of digging and
returning stock, I did hear a few bitter comments about one or another large
hybridizer who sent a large volume of plants and asked for every one of them
back.

As a small hybridizer, I'd like to offer these thoughts:

Question:  Whether the host region should limit the number of plants to be
sent by any one hybridizer.

Most conventions, regional or national, have several guest gardens.
Experience shows that the conditions of show gardens and the plants in them
can vary greatly.  Knowing this, the hybridizer wants to be able to send
enough rhizomes that they can be grown in several gardens, preferably three or
four.  This also gives the judges an idea of how well the seedling grows from
one garden to the next.  The conventions to which I have submitted guest
seedlings have usually limited each hybridizer's entries to 40 or 50 rhizomes.
If you are a serious hybridizer, you may easily have 10 seedlings to which you
want to give exposure.  For a convention limiting submissions to 40 and having
four gardens, this would give you the opportunity to have each of your
seedlings grown in all four gardens.  If you wanted to submit more than 10
varieties, then you'd have to settle for their being grown in fewer gardens
each.  I think this is a reasonable requirement.

Question:    Whether rhizomes should be returned to the hybridizer.

A small hybridizer can run himself short on breeding stock when attempting to
send his seedlings around for exposure and testing.  This is especially true
in the case of varieties that are slow to increase.  It's sort of a
damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation:  To get the exposure, or to
build up the stock?  If he knows that he can expect to receive the increase
back from the host, it is a hearty incentive to send his stock for display.
Also, the hybridizer learns things.  When the rhizomes come back, I have
sometimes been astonished at how much better a particular seedling has grown
elsewhere than here in its home garden!  And, sad to say, vice-versa.

Question:  Whether ALL rhizomes should be requested back, or . . . ?

Here, I can only speak for myself.  The conventions to which I have sent
seedlings have allowed the submitter to designate different treatment for
different seedlings.  Where I have had sufficient stock of a particular
variety, I have usually asked for half of the increase to be returned and the
rest left to the club, making sure that each host garden gets to keep at least
one.  Where I really need to recover as much as I can, I designate one for
each host garden and ask that the rest be returned.  There may be reasons that
I can't think of for a hybridizer to ask for all of his rhizomes and their
increase back, and maybe we will hear from someone in that situation.  We're
all at the mercy of weather, of course.  I had a seedling that I intended to
introduce this year.  I've had it for several years, and it multiplies so
quickly that I've told host regions to keep the rhizomes.  Last winter's mild
temperatures and excessive rainfall nearly wiped it out.  Now, I must conserve
all of it in order to rebuild the stock.

Question:  Who should pay the postage?

I think that for the benefit of exposure and return of the increase, the
hybridizer should bear the cost of mailing both ways.

--  Griff

zone 7 in Virginia

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