Re: HIST: going commercial
Jan Clark wrote:
> James writes:
> >My historic project is to create new G&K varities by crossing with
> >others of the same era, and this year I used Alcazar as the basis for
> >most of my crosses, some of which took. Only another year to see if I
> >have reinvented someone else's wheel, or come a step closer to finally
> >putting the 1939 G&K catalog on the market.
>
> This idea appeals to me. Are you trying to use the same irises as G&K to try
> and reproduce the results of certain crosses?
Not really. For one thing, I strongly suspect that their breeding notes were
lost, so this is unknown. The current nursery on the site, Heinz Klose, raises
only peonies.
G&K was a firm that was wiped out by war. Goos, the salesman, died before WWI,
the last Koenemann son died about 1922, an eventual gas victim of WWI, and the
work was carried forward by a manager, who was buffeted by trade embargos with
Germany, horrendous inflation, and finally the occupation of the Rhineland
(where G&K was) by Hitler and WWII. The last catalog was 1938. I claim a tenuous
relationship to Goos through my great-grandfather August Feder von Berlin, or as
my grandmother put it, "What would the Goos be without his Feder?"
I was struck by the fact that so long as you have rhizomes, you have the exact
same flower as the historic iris, which meant that all I had to do was collect
G&K and its peers of that era and continue the breeding work from that point
forward - in short, to Introduce new G&K varieties to the marketplace (I do come
from the salesman's side).
It would not be the first catalog to come out with apologies for being late,
although going back to the year of my birth (1939) may be more like a time wrap
than mere tardiness.
The Buddha counseled that part of anguish is attempting to go back to the past,
which cannot be done. One should simply let go of it. However, awareness of what
you are doing in a sense of puckish good humor, is simply another way of letting
go, and one that appeals to me.
On the other hand, since one can go back to the original stock, I can return to
this project with a fresh viewpoint and the benefit of a historical perspective
and perhaps my work will bring out new types that would not have been
fashionable and would have been discarded in the 1930s. Then again it may all be
junk, but I will certainly learn a lot more about history and breeding from the
experience.
James Brooks
Jonesborough, TN
comeback@usit.net
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