Re: Paul on daylilies

In a message dated 1/4/2003 10:37:25 PM Central Standard Time,
monica@theturcottes.com writes:


 I'm sorry for the ignorance,but what is "tissue cultured" and why is it a
 no-no.  and does it apply to other perennials as well?


Tissue culture is away to produce new plants from small pieces of plants, its
done in a laboratory and the plants are started off on an agar medium.

When Daylilies were first tissue cultured a method called callus initiation
was used, this worked out well to produce thousands of plants quickly, but it
all so produced off types because cells changed once in while in the callus.
and lots of them too - many moons ago we had a speaker at my local club on TC of daylilies and the statistics on mutations were amazing. It was the opinion of the speaker that daylilies, especially the tetraploids were hard to properly tissue culture. (I didn't take great notes, wish I did, but something to do with the structure of daylily DNA/RNA, blowing smoke to confuse us?).

The bad name was earned in my book because these were knowingly sold as true to name.


Currently, good respectable labs propagate from shot tips and for the most
part (99%) the plants should be the same as any vegitily propagated plant. But once TC got a bad name, many growers wanted to keep the prices high, so
the story still goes around that all TC plants are bad. With proper
procedure and growing out of the product with culling-one can have good
confidence that you are getting the proper plant.
Matthew Kaskel (a new daylily hybridizer) is actively using tissue culture as a means of getting new hybrids to the mass market. I got to hear him speak last summer, and he riled some of the old school hybridizers with this notion. He looked for new hybrids to be garden plants, with great foliage, long bloom/lots of scapes and a pretty face - but with outs lots of ruffles ( won't always open well). If they passed this and did well in trials elsewhere, he puts them into TC for mass marketing. He is insistent on culling, but said he was out of the norm on that.

Lots of plants are tissue cultured, almost all Ferns, Hosta, Heuchera plus
thousands of others in clouding many trees.
I've talked to some of my hosta crazed friends, there seems to be a group that doesn't trust TC there too.

Thanks for the great links!
Cheryl
--
Cheryl Isaak
Londonderry, NH
AHS Region 4, USDA Zone 4B/5A
growing, stitching and reading in NH

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