I first bred petunias when I was 16 and sew a bunch of seeds and only kept one plant that was more vigorous looked completely different from either parent. I usually do morning glories, but I want to take petunia breeding very seriously and I know they derived from a hybrid. My big question is that would the offspring of a F1 cross be identicle. Any advice would help:-)
Tony
Petunia breeding
Tony,
"...would the offspring of an F1 cross be identical? "
If your question is "would the seed saved from an F1 hybrid specimen be identical to the mother parent", then definitely, no, the F2 generation would recombine the genes of the two parents in many different ways, a few of which might resemble the F1 parent.
If your question is "would the seed saved from a particular cross of two parents to create F1 seeds, would the F1 hybrid specimens be identical," the answer would be "yes" only provided that both of the parents were stabilized inbred strains. In most gardening situations, that would not be the case, and there would be some variation in the F1 hybrids themselves.
I breed zinnias as a hobby, and I look forward to the variation that comes from various recombinations of genes, because it produces new forms of zinnias, a few of which I really like. The rest get culled and discarded. You can "dehybridize" a hybrid by saving a lot of seed from it and keeping only those that most resemble the original hybrid, and by repeating that process for several generations. That way you can produce a reasonably pure strain that resembles the original F1 hybrid, but grows "true" in an open pollinated situation.
ZM