Jim... Value adding Hulthemia ;)

A few months ago when OPK206-1 made its second flower I removed the petals and photographed them fresh and they looked like this:

[center][attachment 831 OPK206-9.jpg][/center]

They were then placed between sheets of tissue and pressed in a large book (Botanica of course!), and were promptly forgotten about. I found them by chance again today and they look like this (I ripped one of the petals :frowning: ):

[center][attachment 832 driedpetals.jpg][/center]

I’m thinking there is a link into the craft market here! I can see it on Ebay now… packs of dried and pressed hulthemia petals for dried flower arrangers in packs of 10 LOL They look pretty cool don’t they! Maybe funky fish scales :wink:

Hi Simon,

Haha - too funny!

Speaking of fish, the first thing I ever bred was guppies. Looking at individual Hulthemia petals has always reminded me of the tail fin of fancy guppies!

They remind me of fancy guppy tails too! The frist thing I ever bred was goldfish, which started a long line, continuing right up to today, of breeding all kinds of fish. Now I breed Betta and South American, West African and Central American cichlids and catfish… it’s my other obsession… and thanks to Paul… I have a new obsession in carnivorous plants… I’m off to buy my first Nepenthes (ventricosa) this afternoon to try my luck at growing it as a windowsill plant… Along the way I’ve bred canaries, budgies, zebra finch, chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs and even goats (never again) and alpaca LOL It’s a disease I reckon… no… it’s a fascination with life!

Seriously though… I went and checked Ebay for dried pressed flowers and there is a UK seller who sells HEAPS of them lol…

Simon,

There’s something about breeding that does not restrict us to one genus, nor to one kingdom. I’ve also bred bettas, guppies, African killies (A. gardneri). I once had a ā€œthingā€ for Rift Lake cichlids, but only bred some Kribensis.

I tried gerbils once, but the female ate the head off the male. Then she did it again with the replacement. No means no! So I gave up on that project.

I’ve had a long fascination with carnivorous plants, but never bred any. Any plant that eats flies or mosquitoes is fine with me.

Karl

Karl, it’s something in me that I can’t escape.

Rift Lake Cichlids are another one of my favourites but my taste is not conventional… most people like the cichlids of Lake Malawi… meh…blue and yellow fish… I prefer the cichlids of Lake Tanganyika! I’ve recently bought one of my Sons his first tank full of the shell dwellers Neolamprologus multifasciatus. They are definitely one of my favourites. I’ve got Kribensis now and have bred thousands of them over the past 30 years. I started a project called (creatively) the ā€˜Krib Project’ to get people around Australia to try and follow my plan to line breed Krib to improve their markings and colours compared to the bland mass produced rubbish we normally have access to. I hate breeding that loses site of ā€˜survival of the fittest’! The bland ones just would not get a guernsey in Cameroon!!! One of my all-time favourites is the ordinary and much maligned Convict Cichlid… must be my colonial ancestry coming out in me :wink: I’m even breeding aquatic snails (Apple Snails) at the moment!!! They are awesome.

I think there is a number of reasons I’m into the breeding thing. When I was a kid I use to go to my Grandfather’s flat in Milson’s Point, Sydney, and help him sort through trays of tiny shells with a binocular microscope for the Australian Museum collections . He was a malachologist and I went on at the age of 16 to do work experience at the Australian Museum in the ichthyology dept where I helped with the accessioning of fish specimens. My other grandparents also ran an orchid nursery and I loved going out there too. I guess I got to see more than most kids would and I developed a deep love for all living things. I went on to do a science degree and an education degree, majoring in genetics and biochemistry but also spent some time looking at ecology and the structural and physiological adaptations living things have that help make them successful. That’s when I really began to take an interest in how and why living things do what they do… the rest is history and now I teach kids about it to try and get them as infected as I am. This is why I do so much of my own thing here at home because I don’t get much call to use biochemistry at school with the 12-16 year olds, though that is not a blanket statement as there have been some outstanding students over the last 20 years that are worse-off than me and I’m getting to do some pretty cool stuff atm… I have a DNA paternity test experiment lined up for next week using gel electrophoresis which is going to be fun!

I once saw a science documentary in which a scientist, I forget who (it was about 20 years ago), said something like… People often say to me, doesn’t knowing why a rose is red take away from its beauty? To which I always reply, no! It makes it even more beautiful.

I guess that’s what drives me… the thing that made me start rose breeding, initially, was that I’ve grown roses since I was 10 years old… but more so I can no longer ethically justify breeding animals… introducing forms that are detrimental to them (like albinism) and having to find homes for the hundreds of offspring that are surplus to ones needs, the lack of care a lot of people have for their pets (to me not knowing ABOUT the pets is the same as neglecting them) or don’t show the traits you are looking for. I can sleep far easier at night knowing that I can feed my excess roses to my alpaca if they don’t measure up, or I can always compost them…

Simon,

ā€œSurvival of the fittestā€ in a tank is not the same as occurs in the wild. Too many "tank breeders’ don’t exercise proper selection, leading to bland and listless fish.

I read an article, years ago, about the first albino Gardeneri. The specimen and its original descendants were weak and slow-growing. An expert breeder improved the strain so much that his albinos were stronger, faster growing, and more active than the usual ā€œwildā€ types that are maintained by hobbyists. Then, a few years ago, I happened across a Killie forum in which some novice claimed that the ā€œalbino geneā€ somehow made that strain stronger and healthier than wild types. So much useful information gets lost when beginners aren’t aware of what came before, and the old guys aren’t around to tell the tale.

In studying other such cases, I’ve found that it takes about a human generation or so (maybe 20-30 years) for an original and accurate account to get thoroughly scrambled. I found this in regards to the Pingu (pink guppy) and ā€œMajor Clarke’s Blue Edged Hybridā€ sweet pea. Later, seemingly authoritative accounts get the facts wrong, as a check through the old literature would reveal. To be fair, it’s easier to straighten out some of the confusions now that we have access to books.google.com

Karl

I was thinking of rabbits when I mentioned albinism. There is nothing wrong with their vigour… but their visual acuity is greatly compromised resulting in animals that ā€˜scan’. Their vision is like how we see things through a slightly fogged-up window and they constantly scan their heads from side-to-side in an effort to gauge distance and detail more clearly. To see them in a cage is quite sad. On the other hand… I still have albino rabbits (a breed I have been developing that incorporates long hair into the rex variety that has modified guard hairs in the same way the rex gene does in a short coat so that when the hair is removed you don’t need to separate out the guard hairs) and I keep their runs outside and in better light they don’t seem to suffer to the same degree.

I think the websites like HMF are an important tool to help eliminate the ā€˜Chinese whispers’, at least from a contemporary POV anyway. Breeders have a chance to detail their own projects and processes in a ā€˜permanent’ record. Roses like Dr Basye’s roses are suffering from this now and I think it gets to a point where it becomes better to NOT try and work it out rather than further muddy the water with speculation.

Simon,

I agree, up to a point. Too often people try to ā€œcorrectā€ earlier reports (however accurate) to bring them into line with a fashionable theory. Some writers have insisted that Tantau’s three ā€˜Baby Chateau’ x R. roxburghii hybrids really turned up in the F2 generation or a back-cross. They needed to think this because they believed that F1 crosses should be once-blooming. However, Wulff got his information directly from Tantau that they were indeed F1 hybrids. The unexpected chromosome number (all three are tetraploids) should not occur in a cross between a tetraploid and a diploid, though it did happen previously with ā€˜Eva’ (diploid x tetraploid), a grandparent of ā€˜Baby Chateau’.

On other occasions, speculation occurs only because the ā€œtrue factsā€ have been misplaced, forgotten in an obscure or unlikely journal, magazine or newspaper. Digging up the forgotten facts is useful, not merely to ā€œset the record straightā€, but to provide us with a path towards improvement – in the case of plant breeding.

There was another dispute, I think it involved Kordes, when a reported hybrid of R. moyesii turned up tetraploid rather than pentaploid, as expected. Looking back we find that fargesii (tetraploid) was formerly regarded as a mere color variant of moyesii (hexaploid). Anyone who bred from fargesii at the time can be forgiven for claiming moyesii as the parent.

I still think the rox hybrids were the result of doubling of the female ploidy, but I am also willing to be completely wrong.

Hi Simon,

That’s great that you have bred so many different things. I think that this ā€œbreeding traitā€ in many of us is more all encompassing than just breeding roses! I had tried goldfish, but couldn’t get them big enough to be breeding size. I did have success with Zebra Danios, but who wouldn’t be able to breed them! I also crossed the regular Silver Angelfish with Marble Angelfish and found that marble was dominant to silver - had lots of fry. My next Cichlid to try were Discus, but never got them to successfully breed. I had tried Bettas, but could not get fry beyond the ā€œbubble nestā€. I would still like to try them again - some of the colors are amazing!

Other projects for me included breeding hot peppers. My Dad loved hot peppers, so I wanted to bred something new. There was some success, but I gave up when going to college. In my Genetics class in college I bred fruit flies to be wingless, with white eyes and ebony bodies. The coolest flies were the winged ones with ebony bodies and white eyes!

I had thought that I would like to try breeding animals too, and considered breeding racing pigeons when we bought this house where the prior owners bred and raced pigeons. Since the birds were trained to ā€œhome inā€ on our house, he was going to get rid of most of them. When I learned how his culls were handled - gassing and clubbing!!, I decided that breeding roses was more along my natural inclination toward love and peace…

Hi Karl,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the account of Pingu! I still have my books on guppy breeding from when I was a teenager - I used to pour over the sections on genetics. I liked the gold body guppies the most. Finding that it was a recessive trait, it was fun to recover the trait through crossing the F1’s together. It was fascinating to me to be able to actually see the gold body babies visible through the gravid spot of the grey bodied F1 pregnant females!

Learning from Mr. Moore that the golden California Poppies had been successfully bred though selective breeding into dark orange poppies by starting with a selection that just exhibited a fleck of orange in some of the petals, I have been following a similar approach with the Hulthemias. The first blotches were small and faint (and on diseased plants!), but through successive generations, I am seeing some improvements.

Jim,

I remember as a kid when my family visited my mother’s sister and family, I’d busy myself reading her guppy book - an old one by Myron Gordon - to learn all I could about guppy genetics. That was long before I raised any of my own.

Burbank also did some interesting things with the California ā€œpoppyā€. He found one with a thin red line on one petal. He raised around a thousand seedlings, but only 4 or 5 had the red line. From the best of these he eventually raised the crimson.

Every where I look I find such trivial variations, and wonder what might become of them if I had time and space to take them in hand. I recently found a crown vetch with salmon-pink flowers. And another that was bright rose. Very different from the usual types.

Then there’s this:

Beaton: Pelargoniums (1861)

It is a curious saying to state that colour can be made to grow, but the fact is certain. A black or brown spot not bigger than a pin’s head has been made to grow in Pelargoniums to the size of a broad Windsor Bean; and all the pink, rose, scarlet, and white in that aristocratic race have been grown from small and very insignificant beginnings.

Kunderd found a few gladioli that had a bit of waviness to the petals, and developed them.

I have long imagined that ā€˜Permanent Wave’ might be developed into something, just as Burbank developed a Heuchera with slightly crinkled leaf-margins. I was reminded of this possibility again recently while looking through a book on daylilies - some with gold braided petals. Imagine a single-flowered rose with deep crimson or purple Hulthemia-blotches, edged by a crinkled white or yellow margin.

Karl

These are actually off topic, but fun stories.

Ralph told the story of a plum which was quite hot in the teens or twenties. A man approached Burbank with the offer that if he could produce one thousand trees of this plum by the following season, he would take them all. Burbank knew almonds germinated quickly and produced graftable whips, so he sewed more than a thousand almonds to produce the whips. He busily grafted this plum to every seedling which emerged and had well over nine hundred of these plums ready for the man by the deadline. He bought them all.

Ralph had a pink California poppy which he felt would be very decorative if grown along the freeway embankments. The issue was, how to get poppy seeds to the hillsides where he wasn’t able to walk. He began developing mud balls which would hold the seeds on their surfaces, but which would shatter fully, distributing the seed where he wished them. Once he felt he had the required type, he created a box full of them, coated with the pink California poppy seeds, then drove up and down Hwy 198, throwing poppy coated mud balls all along the highway. As he told me the story, I began laughing like a loon. He asked why and I asked him if he’d thought of the newspaper headlinesā€¦ā€œLife-long Visalia businessman and resident arrested for littering the freewayā€. We both got a very good chuckle from it.

What’s being described is precisely how the Halo series of minis arose. Ralph wanted that Hulthemia blotch, but hadn’t access to any of the hybrids yet. He noticed Anytime (among others) had a lavender petal base instead of the obligatory white or yellow. He reasoned lavender was an ā€˜adulterated red’, so he set about to increase the size and intensity of the lavender base, then select for less ā€˜adulterated’ red bases.

He had Angel Farts, so he used it with Anytime to increase the size and intensity of the lavender. He had Orangeade, which is intensely fertile (as are both Angel Farts and Anytime), which also possesses the lavender petal base and which would increase the bloom size and saturate all plant pigments. He selfed regularly to isolate and fix the ā€œhaloā€ he desired, then began inserting Gold Badge and Playboy to decrease the pink and lavender and replace it with the desired yellow. He hunted yellow from his first breeding efforts. He was immensely pleased with Halo Sunrise, feeling he had accomplished replicating Hulthemia without using any of its genes. Further crossing his Halos with Hulthemias excited him as he felt he was reinforcing and improving the trait.

He did similarly in an effort to create a truly double Crepe Myrtle. His final result was very deep violet, containing two and a half ā€œpetalsā€ with very few stamen. He’d created a line of denser, shorter Crepe Myrtles which J&P expressed an interest in and had actually given him money for, but never did anything with. His lilac breeding followed similar lines. He selected for stronger, more upright plants, which would flower earlier and longer with less winter chill. He had hybrids in the ā€œback fortyā€ with individual florets of nearly an inch in diameter! His Blue Skies is one of the finest, most reliable, warmer weather lilacs available. I have two of his seedlings, one of which began flowering here in October. It’s final flowers are fading and drying now. We don’t really have a ā€œwinter chillā€ here. Burbank’s white black berry will not flower and fruit here. The evergreen, ever-bearing, thornless black berry will not flower and fruit here. The remaining self seedling of Burbank’s Apex Plumcot I have, will flower lightly unless the winter is particularly ā€œsevereā€. It’s one of the most heavily flowering, most beautiful flowering fruit trees I have encountered. Not very good fruit, but as an ornamental tree, it is spectacular.

Ralph played with amaryllis for decades. One of his green houses had a long row of them in the ground under one of the benches. The foliage of these amaryllis grew through the slatted benches and obscured the two and three gallon roses which grew on the benches. His flower spikes were over three feet tall and carried not the three expected flowers, but heads of up to seven, large, red amaryllis blooms. Of course, the bulbs were also massive. Carolyn made sure people got some of the bulbs so they wouldn’t be lost once his children had their way with the nursery, but I’m not sure where they are.

Burbank did all of this to create the thornless prickly pear cactus, figuring it would make an excellent, sustainable cattle fodder, except cattle won’t touch it. His white black berry was a great accomplishment as it succeeded in eliminating black berry problems of staining your teeth, fingers and clothing as he saw them. They DO taste good, but are the snottiest looking fruit I’ve ever seen. Greenish-ivory-white, translucent berry sections with visible seeds (resembling snail eggs!), quickly taking on tobacco coloring as they age. They contain much sugar, so begin aging very quickly. One of my favorite bosses was of Greek descent and would eat anything. I brought her a bag of ripe, white black berries. She made me eat some first as she said from their look, I was surely trying to poison her! Alone, they would make the nastiest looking jams, jellies and pies! But, shared with a friend in Alabama who wins the Fairs and other competitions for her jams and jellies, the nearly colorless juice has enabled her to include black berry flavors in lighter colored creations and led her to several wins because of her ā€˜secret ingredient’.

Ralph was aware of the Pink Panda strawberry. He dabbled for many years, attempting to develop a potentella flowered, yellow with red center, fruiting strawberry. He selected forms, types and sports of conifers, communis and other plants. His Westmont arborvitae was a selection he named for Westmont College, the proceeds from its sales going to fund a scholarship to the college.

Ralph satisfied his ā€œDr. Moreauā€ interests with plants. He could ruthlessly cull seedlings and plants, and was disappointed when something failed to flourish. He could never have bred animals. He ached for strays; all were either taken in or found homes. He ached for the loss of any animal or person. The nursery had many old, stray cats, and all knew they were forbidden entry to the greenhouses. ā€œHis catā€, the one who followed him around like a dog, remained on the roof of the greenhouse he was in, remaining as close to him as she could, only above him. Carolyn has photos of her on the roof above his head and shared it with us at the recent Visalia event.

I love these stories you come up with, Kim.

That cat story, especially his cat, is SOOOO CUTE !

:slight_smile:

Thank you. By ā€œhisā€, of course, I am meaning the one who attached herself to HIM. He didn’t keep ā€œpetsā€, but as long as they ate critters, they got fed by the nursery, also. He cared about what happened to them, he just didn’t want to have to be the one to take care of them. I can understand that. If I had WANTED ā€œchildrenā€, I would have HAD children! LOL!

If I had WANTED ā€œchildrenā€, I would have HAD children!

yeah I toooootally understand.

Kim,

Thanks for the info on Moore’s Halo roses. I guess I need to rip out a few petals when I’m taking pictures to get the whole story on pigment distribution. I have argued before (on other forums) that some interesting things can happen in transition zones - where the claw of the petal gives way to the blade. There are considerable changes in gene expression in such regions. Years ago I read a recipe for rose petal sandwiches. The author warned that the nubs (claws) should be removed because they are bitter. More obviously to the eye, there is usually a change in pigmentation.

I once saw a peach tree with flowers that appeared to be merely a very pale pink. When I looked more closely, I saw that in the transition zone between claw and petal there was a thin, light red line. And in daylilies there are often different colors and shades between the eye zone and the rest of the petal.

The one time I saw Burbank’s white blackberry, at the Burbank house in Santa Rosa, the fruit looked very clean. I guess I got there on a good day, before the color changed. Considering the health benefits of the anthocyanin pigments, a white blackberry is not a nutritional improvement, but people do love novelties. And it is a good example of how a mutation (such as the original ā€œCrystal Whiteā€) is a starting point for amelioration, not a finished product.

Karl

I’m glad you enjoyed the information, Karl. I had visited the Burbank House nearly thirty years ago and asked if they propagated plants for sale. The woman said they didn’t, but some things were just so ā€œenthusiasticā€, they had to rough them out from where they weren’t welcome. They just ā€œhappened to haveā€ a gallon of the blackberry which they happily sold me for $8. It has helped itself to everywhere I have exposed to it since. Would you like a piece? I’ve kept it canned and have little of it left. I’m not sure if I want to expose this hill to it or not. It won’t fruit here and there are already enough prickly things to deal with!