Re: HYB: pedigrees, "reality"

I agree completely with taking pedigrees with a grain of salt.

But keep in mind that we dont' always fully understand what's going on
with expression of traits, especially with these mixed up "tetraploids",
where there is opportunity for mismatched & therefore broken bits of
chromosomes, lost or added traits.  Not likely, but as other experienced
hybridizers keep telling me,  you never know for sure what you will get.

Back when I was working as a technician for one particular researcher,
he would abandon experiments when the results didn't make any sense,
rather than trying to figure out what was going on.  It was very
frustrating - he assumed I had done something wrong, rather than
investigating further to see if there was some additional process
involved that we didn't know about or didn't understand.  We missed a
'scoop' on the remineralization of sulphur from leaf litter into the
atmosphere, because 'that couldn't happen'.  Several years later, other
researchers at a different lab ran into the same 'impossibility',
investigated further, and discovered that prior assumptions about the
sulfur cycle were wrong.  ...

In my own crosses, one of the bee pods (PINK FORMAL) produced seedlings
of two very different types.  One type is extra tall, heavy stalks, deep
branching, huge blooms, various pigments.  The other type is also tall,
but has thinner, more wiry stalks, higher branching, small more tailored
blooms, yellow to cream colored.  "Obviously" different pollen parents.
.....Maybe <g>

Neil said:
<I know of at least two cases where a variety carries genetics that
can't
                   possibly come from the published ancestry. ....I,
too, take pedigrees with a grain of salt.  We do the best we can, and
                   sometimes a bee or something else gets involved.>

--
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>
talk archives: <http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-talk/>
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