HIST: DOMINION Race

I've run across the term "Dominion Race" a number of times in old publications.
In the classic book "Irises", Henry Randall stated that 

"Dominion (its children and grandchildren were later generally called the
'Dominion Race') was a deep purple with great substance and velvety falls."

(For non-historians on the list, DOMINION was one of the tetraploid ancestors of
our modern TBs.  It often passed velvety falls on to its children and this line
had an enormous influence on the development of today's TBs.)

In assembling my pedigree files, though, I've identified a number of other
cultivars with similar chromosome complement (50).  Too many to be explained
away by observational error or as typical aneuploids.  Some, like AMBASSADEUR,
LENT A. WILLIAMSON, and KASHMIR WHITE, were also significant breeders.  

>From pedigree analysis, it looks as if this group might have been what we refer
to today as a "fertile family" (probably functioning as amphidiploids).  We do
know, however, that they exhibited enough compatibility with the somewhat more
common 48-chromosome tetraploids to produce a significant number of offspring
with them.  Some of those, like the 49-chromosome BRUNO, themselves became
important contributors to the modern gene pool -- but after generations of
intercrossing, the TBs appeared to stabilize as 48-chromosome tetraploids.  (The
latest introductory date I found for a 50-chromosome cultivar was 1942.)

DOMINION itself, and many of the others, predated the early chromosome studies.
So did Randall's definition of the term persist?  Or is it possible that some of
the other references to the "Dominion Race" meant these Dominion-like cultivars,
rather than DOMINION's direct descendants?

Sharon McAllister
73372.1745@compuserve.com
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