Re: shelf on Camelot Rose?

I've been going through photos I've collected from the Internet and catalogs also, looking for shelves and lack of them.  It is a lot easier to see suggestions of shelves, I've found, than to be sure a cv *doesn't* have one.  I'm trying to make a list of recent, good irises that seem to have the quality.
 
Robin Shadlow has had an e-mail exchange with Don Spoon where he also has mentioned watching for the shelf as an indicator of possible good parents for SA's.
 
Don has suggested, if I understood Robin's report rightly, that what we are dealing with is more complicated than genetics alone.  The hormonal systems involved in blossom formation may be involved.
 
Even though hormonal systems in plants are delrived from genetic sources, their behavior is highly subject to a host of factors including position, fertility and vigor.  That certainly does seem to describe what we see with SA traits..
 
Another thing that has been on my mind is that single flounce, and a large one, that showed up in a photo published (by Mike Sutton if I remember rightly) of Keppel's WILD WINGS which normally shows no SA character at all.
 
Single petal events like this, including wedges of violet color in a white iris, or white in a light blue, often are the result of a high energy particle ("Cosmic Ray") zipping through a DNA string and breaking a sequence governing an enzyme or hormone.  My wild guess at what happened here in Wild Wings is that something that *prevents* SA traits--in other words, an Inhibitor--got punched out in that wedge, allowing the flounce to form.  A governing factor or inhibitor is hardly unknown in irises.  Consider "Dominant White," for example. This could well be something we might want to consider when beginning to analyse results a few years from now.
 
Just more "thinking"
 
Neil Mogensen

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