This may get a little long, so before you lose interest, feel free to post fun siblings from your seedlings, or maybe crosses where your kid daylily doesn't make a lot of sense given the parent daylilies. It's supposed to be kind of a learning thread about how genes are passed from parents to kids (in daylilies).

Some newer hybridizers think Plant X x Plant Z = Plant Y. But I'm skeptical, so I've been experimenting with crosses since I started doing it back in 2015. I'm starting this thread posting the results of one of those experiments. I think a lot of us have done Plant 1 x Plant 2 and Plant 2 x Plant 1 kind of things to see what the difference is in the kids. This one is just a little more complicated.

The star of this experiment is Adorable Curls, a fun, spidery dip with twists and kinks on both the sepals and petals by Geraldine Couturier.

Adorable Curls:


The co-stars are siblings from seeds I bought from Steve Todd, Margarets Spirit (Todd) x Pinewood Lily Pad (Korth-Korth):


Which resulted in these sibling seedlings that were used in the experiment:


And the experiment was to use these to see real examples of when genetic siblings are crossed with the same plant, and whether it looks different if the siblings were the pod parent or the pollen parent. So the pictures below are:

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Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling A (Pollen)
Seedling A (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)
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Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen)
Seedling B (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)
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Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling C (Pollen)
Seedling C (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)
-

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Cross Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling A (Pollen)


Kids





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Cross Seedling A (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)


Unfortunately, Sibling A was pod-stubborn and didn't produce any viable seeds.

=
Cross Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen)


Kids



--
Cross Seedling B (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)


Kids



==
Cross Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling C (Pollen)


Kids



-
Cross Seedling C (Pod) x Adorable Curls (Pollen)


Kid (ooof)


===

Edited to correct pod/pollen typos. Thanks Larry! Good catch.

Tim I will take seedling "A" pollen number four kid. Great experiment. All three of sibs from the purchased seeds look related for sure.

I forgot to mention that the variability of the second generation seedlings are something else.

Tim I think it's great that you're doing experiments like this. Do you think you are getting any interesting results or insights?

I have to say that in general I'm skeptical that comparing the kids of siblings is likely to show much-- siblings can just be too different...

And on top of that, in your experiment you have 8 kids on one side of the comparison and 3 on the other. That's most likely just not enough kids to gain any insights IMO.

The most likely thing I think you'd learn about is which traits are dominant and recessive.

However, it sure is fun to explore, isn't it? We've all been surprised by things, so you never know when some neat insight will pop up. If you're enjoying the process than all it takes is an interesting insight every now and then to keep the motivation, and fun, flowing...

Mike, I had to cull seedlings from 2016 before I saw the results from this, so as luck would have it, I culled Seedling A and kept Seedling C, which looked the nicest to me, but clearly isn't as good of a parent as Seedling A was.

Dennis, one of the things that brought that test on was I noticed a number of hybridizers listing two to three generations when they registered their parentage. I was thinking that wasn't helpful because, are people really buying a plant because they are enamored with one of the "grandparents"? But I did actually notice some of the siblings passing on characteristics of one of the grandparents. Cross Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen) seems to be passing on more of the Margaret's Spirit genes than the other Seedlings. I really like Margarets Spirit, and I really, really like that ivory kid with some of PLP's green radiating through it. If I were a real hybridizer, I would probably want to plant 50 seeds from a cross between Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen) looking for more kids that lean toward Margaret's Spirit that I would like.

The other thing I learned is, you can't judge the parent by the cover. Seedling A produced some of the prettiest blooms. Some of the other crosses struggled a bit. But I didn't even keep Seedling A because I don't have a lot of room, and chose to keep Seedling C instead, which so far has not been a great parent at all. Unfortunately, I don't have room to cross everything to find a magic parent, so I have to live with the fact that I'm probably going to compost a bunch of great parents because they have better looking siblings. But if I were a real hybridizer, I might try harder to cross more "uglier" seedlings to make sure they aren't a super parent.

I do save some odd looking seedlings if they have a trait I like, tons of blooms, bud building, excellent branching, a special watermark, or they bloom VL or EE. But if I were going to be serious about hybridizing, based on what I've seen in my experiments, I would probably have to find room to keep all my seedlings an extra two years to judge them as parents and not just by their looks.

Celeste (Celestialrose) and I are growing seedlings from reciprocal crosses.
I found 2 of her pics, (links below) but would be all day digging in the threads to find more so had to stop.
The sample size is minute so no statistically significant conclusions can be drawn. But they do look pretty similar.
https://garden.org/thread/view...
https://garden.org/thread/view...

Nice example, Orion. This is what I was hoping for. Agreed, my test also was statistically insignificant, as I only had room for 5 seedlings of each cross, but I think for showing a new hybridizer, or someone thinking about it, this kind of parent to child relationship might be helpful.

That grouping is almost too nice, though. You don't normally get four beauties like that out of a cross. Maybe I'll look around my pictures to see if I can demonstrate what it's like when the kids aren't all keepers.

Thanks for the contribution.

I worked in my PlantStep program a lot today. I had so many new plants that I did not have any info on as far as being pod or pollen fertile. So I did as much research as I could and added that info, then I used the planner in the program to plan crosses testing for fertility. I used quite a few reciprocal crosses in the process, I just figured that would be an easy way to test them. So hopefully in a couple of years I will be able to show some of the results.

That makes sense to me, Larry. I've heard from others that use a plant that's a strong pollen parent to test pods, and vice versa, instead of reciprocal crosses. But I don't do enough crossing to know which pollen or pods to use like that, yet.

I started stratifying my 2022 seedlings today, and I noticed I'm still doing a lot of reciprocal crosses. I guess I like that way, and I'm still curious about the outcomes.

Here's most of the results of crossing Rainbow Radiance and Spider Spirits a few years ago.
Cross of Spider Spirits x Rainbow Radiance [SS is difficult to set pods on]





Reciprocal cross of Rainbow Radiance x Spider Spirits

I did try to pick a plant I had no info on as far as pod and pollen fertile, to be crossed with a known pod fertile and pollen fertile plant for the crosses. If I only knew a plant was pollen fertile or only pollen fertile I did two reciprocal crosses. I did it with a dual or triple purpose also, all the known fertile plants also were selected for some degree of sculpted relief, the blooms had to look like they would make a decent child, and I selected to create midrange heights when possible. I don't like plants shorter than 26 inches and not much taller than 40 inches.

I think I showed these earlier, but it a great example of the good, bad and the ugly from the same cross. Never had seeds from the same pod be so different. One definitely takes after the Undefinable kid parent, another Clown Pants, and the last road kill…lol.

Tim we all need a greenhouse here in the north to level the playing field.

Thanks Mike & Tim for the acorns!

Our friend Jason Halonen shared this link on Facebook. IMHO it fits in right here. Mainly the second half by Brian Reeder. https://daylilybreeder.blogspo...

I was blown away just by the first photo. I can't imagine having seedlings with the base width those have, what am I not doing?