Hybridizers: And so it begins..., 1 by pmmGarak

pmmGarak wrote:
I think I have kidnapped Zen_Man's wonderful Zinnia thread long enough, so I'm setting up my own - at this point, I've obviously nothing to show, so I mostly use this to put myself under some social pressure to proceed ;-)

Reading through that Tychonievich-book ZM recommended, I noticed I already did some breeding selection before: Keeping only those plants which germinate early is actually selecting for fast germination - that's so simple that I never thought about it, yet it IS encouraging...Now I'm ready to start my first projects - yes, it's more then one, since I've got different timescales, and by broadening the base I have the chance that at least one or two will get me hooked up like ZM on the Zinnias...

The fast timescale: Nigella. I've had self-sowing Nigella Damascena in my parent's garden for ages, and have already established some from that genetic base in my garden (see image), which is only slowly taking form. I bought the house about three years ago, but had 1 1/2 years of work at it bringing it to the point where I could move in - bringing a house built 1899 to modern standards with mostly own work involved is quite a task, and there's still a lot of work to do, so the garden went second place for most of that time. There wasn't much worth keeping - I got rid of a far to big pine (who plants them in a small suburban garden anyway?), an ornamental cherry (which looked awful after the first drop of rain on the fluffy pink flowers) an English dogwood (I only call it "the aphid magnet") and lots of Thuja ( how can anything thats called "Lebensbaum" = "Tree of life" be so dead on the inside??), so I've lots of room to fill - annuals will be helpful with that in the short term. But I'm drifting away.
Back to the Nigellas. They already have two generations per year, being totally hardy - perhaps that's a side effect of years of self sowing? I'd guess so. To obtain more genetic diversity to work with, I got myself, in addition to my selfsowing whites and blues, some pink "Mulberry Rose", and some White-Flowering "Pluto Wedding", which are advertised to have bright red seed capsules - something I haven't got in mine. So one objective may be to create blues with red capsules. Or maybe something into the purple color range? My self-sowers would suggest that the pink is recessive, but I need to monitor that carefully. I may look into more bizarre seed capsules or anything else which may occur in the first few generations. I got myself some other Nigella species to see if they're willing to cross. A Nigella Hispanica (which most seed traders call N. Papillosa, but I'm keeping to Wikispecies-Nomenclature) could introduce both black seed capsules during the flowering and some speckles. It also seems to have it's anthers more sorted in packs oposing to the less formal damascenas, but I have more species to experiment with, just in case.
In order for the new ones to catch up with my garden, I've even invested into artificial lighting, though I'm not yet convinced that this Red/blue LED thing will be efficient - It sure doesn't look natural to me, but as I'm no chloroplast...

Second project, one generation per year, is Digitalis - actually one of the few things I bought with the house that IS worth keeping: a self sowing, rather white D. Purpurea. Once again I've obtained seed for another D. Purpurea to mix with, a D. Grandiflora, which is documented to be hybridize-able with the D. Purpurea, and a D. Obscura, which I had never heard of before. Lets see what happens...

Those were the big and systematic ones, but I'll actually try some smaller ones: Very basic: as my Aquilegias dwindled through self-sowing to a set of mostly white-pink-purplish doubles (once again: my parents garden), I got myself a red-and-yellow american native Aquilegia, leaving the work to the bees and helping by consequently deadheading my pink ones. Let's see if those are as "promiscuous" as Tychonievich writes.
A little more complex: I've ordered some more or less hardy gladiolous species seeds and have wintersowed them - that's already the first step of selection, as I want them hardy in my 7a. I just hope some of the more colorful south-Africans will make it, as all obtainable native European varieties insist on flowering magenta (German Telekom seems to have sponsored them...). That one surely has a wider timescale to deal with - at least three years to flower.
Last action planned will be to sow out my Tigridia Pavonia seeds I produced more or less unintended - I was a bit lazy with deadheading. Since I had several days with more than one color flowering, there might be some nice surprises. once again: three years/generation as a likely timescale - but you can never have too many Tigridias, I totally adore those!

I've many more ideas - once you start thinking about it, there's nowhere to stop. But I'm afraid i'm quite limited in space (and maybe time). Let's see if I can take over my sister's garden - she's the only one in the family who has missed the gardening genes..