Re: HYB.Breeding for Older Form and the Market

>        In the late fifties, Lloyd Austin developed the first Space Age
>irises, and to this day they are abhorred by many.

Do they have valid concerns, or is the revulsion merely a conflict of taste?

Ron Mullin went to town on SAs during the judging school he gave for us
last summer. He left the impression it was kind of a wicked thing to breed
SAs.  I'm no big fan of horizontal falls with lettuce-like ruffles, but
that's just my taste. Variety *is* the spice of life! Give me a little of
everything, please, including the grand dames of the past.

Now, if it were possible that hybridizers and nurseries were discarding the
older forms in favor of spoons and flounces and horizontal falls, that
would be a problem.
In the current Society for Louisiana Irises bulletin, Sharon Lipiec
expresses  just that concern. She thinks so much effort is going into
making fatter, more JA-like flowers the older diverse forms of the LAs are
being lost. She says she wanted to order new starts of RUTH HOLLEYMAN,
'BOUT MIDNIGHT, CLARA GOULA and BLACK WIDOW locally but found supplies of
older irises had been reduced in favor of newer "fat" cultivars.

She complains that tetraploidy has produced "ostentatious, overpowering"
blooms without scent. Among others she cites GODZILLA, which she says has
blooms so large it's impossible to distinguish from a JA. "I first heard of
this introduction," she says, "on a garden tour when a woman commented that
her young son was demanding it. What does that tell you?"

Here's another quote:

"I really become chagrined," she says, "seeing the photos of the new
Louisianas we are being asked to make room for. They are losing their
identity when one thinks of their original habitat. I picture waterways and
bayous with droning insects and bird life (throw in an alligator)
fluttering around in the hot sun. But as with everything else in the world
today, we are 'destroying' what was, all in the name of progress."

What do you-all make of these concerns? Is her perception correct that
species-like LAs are being pushed off the market? Or did she just go
shopping in the wrong place at the wrong time?

P.S. What I would really like to add to my garden are more arilbreds with
that cupped and tapered aril fall but TB moisture tolerance.

celia
storey@aristotle.net
Little Rock, Arkansas ... where today I not only mowed the lawn for the
first time this year, but chased the first dang housefly through three
rooms without catching it.
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