HYB: pollen musings, trip to Rockytop, long

Thanks to a friend with time who likes to drive & also loves iries,
managed to get to Phil William's garden earlier this week.  And thanks
to Phil's generosity, got some good looking pollen from a few wide,
large flowered TBs with maybe some survivable genes on very recent
introductions, including a 2005.

Very end of bloom season at his place, and nearly so here, but these are
the ones most likely to bloom in spite of the worst years of late
freezes.

Makes me think I ought to seriously consider hiring somebody to drive me
to Phil's for pollen every year, and forget trying to grow my own!

Given how hard it is for me to get good pollen on anything, plus how few
plants have the extraordinary health I want, my hybridizing focus has
shifted this year towards breeding for plants that are going to be
reliable pollen producers here.

Lots of oldies here are good pollen producers, but not many among the
newer ones I've tried to grow.

So far, CELEBRATION SONG is about the only profusely blooming, reliable
producer of tons of good pollen here among recent cultivars I've grown.
Its seedlings also are producing a lot of pollen.

Fortunately, ROMANTIC EVENING also produces a lot of good pollen & in
spite of its poor growth and few blooms here, seems to be producing
healthy seedlings.

SHARPSHOOTER may turn out to be another one like RE.  Struggling plant,
one or two flowers per single stunted stalk, only a few poor stamens,
but seems to have set a pod on everything it touched this year.

CRAZY FOR YOU is fairly healthy here, produces normal stalks, and blooms
are usually loaded with pollen, but it doesn't increase much.  More or
less replaces itself.

VIOLET MIRACLE and HARVEST OF MEMORIES produce tons of pollen on
rebloom, but not always on spring bloom, in fact, this is the first
spring bloom I've had on VM.

Quite a few dark purples, red blacks & blue blacks, both old and recent,
grow really well here, appear healthy, bloom reliably, but rarely
produce pollen.

=====Any of the rest of you run into this problem with poor to no pollen
in the majority of your bloom, and if you do, are there some fairly
recent introductions that are prolific pollen producers for you?

Would appreciate very much names of a few more good pollen producers.
When I say good, I mean <really> good, like CELEBRATION SONG.

Or is CSONG a good pollen producer for everybody (assuming it grows at
all for you)?

LULLABY OF SPRING is also a prolific pollen producer, and one of its
kids at Phil's was loaded with pollen.  Several gorgeous FOGBOUND
descendants (some from Keith Keppel and some from Joe Ghio) had some
pollen but not much.  Ghio's SOCIETY PAGE had quite a bit of pollen.

I was mostly looking hard at width, size and pollen production (plus
pedigrees) so didn't take notes on much else, but Rick Tasco's ROYAL
STORM caught my eye - very showy.  And David Miller's TOO BELOW ZERO.

Another one that had a lot of pollen was Francis Rogers' SUMMER CATCH.

That was about it in the ones with really wide falls & good substance.

In my garden, several first time bloomers from Barry Blyth were loaded
with good pollen, but this was such an unusual spring with no late
freezes, that I don't know if they will usually be this good.  Lots of
goodpollen on DIGNITY DANCER, ABOUT TOWN, MAN ABOUT TOWN, EASY LIVING,
SILK ROMANCE, and PROPOSAL.

--
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
East Tennessee Iris Society <http://www.korrnet.org/etis>
American Iris Society web site <http://www.irises.org>
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