HYB: pinks from non-pinks

Back in the fifties and sixties I didn't have many quality parents that showed
pink.  Most of those with any of the kinds of qualities we take for granted
now were out of my reach price-wise.

The early pioneers in pink breeding--Dave Hall, Tell Muhlestein, Dr. Loomis
particularly--started from *all* non-pinks, since the first recognizable "pink
bud" irises showed up in their gardens.  Then the outcrosses began.  Tell's
PINK FORMAL came from Pike's Peak Pink (then known as SQ-72) used on Hall's
Golden Eagle.  Golden Eagle came from Sass bloodlines and Hall's own seedlings
that were ones that gave rise to pinks--which, incidentally, included Dr.
Loomis' Morocco Rose in the mix.

I spent a lot of time in the '49 checklist looking for pedigrees that
suggested a cv might carry the "t" factor, and watched the annual R&I's for
crosses producing pink.  So I made a lot of crosses of pink with pink, pink
with probable carriers and some of the pinks with quality non-pinks.  I made a
lot of compost doing all that.  If I had done more of the latter, back
crossing to the best pinks I could afford I might have gotten further.  As it
was I had to work "cheap" or free.  Tell sent me a number of seedlings under
number, both of his and of Dave Hall's.  More compost.

Early pinks had numerous problems.  Thin substance, poor branching, twisted or
crumpled form, weak color were so tightly bound to pink color that a lot of
breeders simply gave up.  "Linkage"--meaning the "t" factor was on the same
chromosome as those terrible traits--was clearly present.

Tell's outcrosses and Melba Hamblen's bench-mark crosses of (blue x pink) X
pink gave the first burst of quality.  She had used Helen MacGregor and Great
Lakes with the best of Hall varieties, then crossed with some of Tell's best.
She probably made a lot of compost too, but her work and similar work by
Orville Fay using outcrosses to pallida, Snow Flurry and New Snow, the
resulting seedlings back-crossed to pink, produced some extraordinary
advances.  All our modern good pinks trace back to these two pioneering
adventurers in crossing pinks out to good material.

Steve Moldovan and Nathan Rudolph built on this foundation.  Rudolph's work
included outcrosses too.  Practically all our good, modern pinks rest on the
foundation blocks built by these pioneers.

There were others working in pink, but these are the names that show up most
strongly in early pink work.

The important thing to note is that the quality pinks came from *outcrosses*
pursued patiently with backcrosses and crossing among the out-cross progenies.
Even though tons of compost resulted, so did the advances for those who
toughed it out and hung in there, patiently, persistingly working the lines.

We can still do the same.  The strategy just requires time, space and stubborn
persistence.

Neil Mogensen  z 7 in the mountains of western NC

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