Pollen Question....?
I have read different ideas on how to do this
is it best to take it off and then set it out on towels to dry
or put in a plastic tub to dry and then put it in the fridge
I need to know this since I thought I could just take it off the plant and have done that already and just put it in the fridge. there were not open yet so likely the pollen is no good in my fridge anymore unless I can put it out and let it dry now and then put it back in the fridge.....

some sites say 3 days to dry and some say it take 5 days...
any thoughts?

Pat, you might try reading what this site says under the sticky thread: Hybridizing lilies. The thread "Pollen/pollination" in Lilies forum

Good info on the background for embryo culture -
One could have gleaned this information from the yahoo lilium group, in the conversations between European "techie" members over the past few years, but I've never found the basics so easily understandable than from this old article written by Dr. Chris North in a 1978 Journal of the Scottish Rock Garden Club:
(Warning! I say "basics", but it is still quite technical.)

Great article. I'll add this one to my collection for sure!

FYI, that would be SRGC Journal #63.

Here's something quite unusual that happened this fall with my seed pods. They split---many, many of them; I'd say a good 1/3rd of all my pods split at one seam or another. I've seen this before on rare occasions with a couple pods here and there, but never to this extent. I'm going to place the blame directly on a recent heavy 5 to 6 inch rainfall received very late in the season here. Prior to that, growing conditions were about as perfect as one could ask for: sunny days, normal temperatures and soil moisture maybe slightly less than average. Everything was shaping up to be a near perfect season. Then, the rains came, pouring rain. Then came a good string of 11 straight days in the 80's with lots of warm-hot sun. This combination must have triggered the inside core of the pod and seeds to re-grow larger and the outside shell, while still green, was no longer elastic or growing.

I came to the same conclusion....

I think Lefty's photo supports Lorn's hypothesis...

I have finally finished candling my delayed hypogeal lily seed, so I ought to get to planting right away. I thought, though, that this would be a good way to illustrate the importance of parental compatibility. Compatibility is a measure of how likely two parent plants (i.e. lilies) will produce viable seed. In general, the better the match of the pod and pollen parents, the more vigorous, more healthy and greater number of viable seed in a pod. Many environmental factors affect pollination, but here I only deal with genetics.

In nature, compatibility usually means the same species or variety within a species, or sometimes just closely related species. In cultivation, the question of compatibility is more complex, because we are able to coax along weak seedlings that would otherwise wither in the wild. We try all sorts of crossing combinations, even though they may be very unlikely to produce good seed. But maybe sometimes, we might get lucky and initiate viable seed that could turn into something extraordinary.

This is an example of good compatibility:
Lilium monadelphum x Lilium monadelphum (mom and pop are not the same vegetative clone)
The pod is good sized, relative to the species’s norm, and normally shaped. It is filled with seed, and the ratio of viable seed (left) to chaff (non-viable seed on the right) is high.


Incompatibility means the two parents cannot produce viable offspring. You can’t cross a lion with a giraffe and get a girion or a liraffe. It just doesn't work. But, compatibility is not always so black and white. Parents can be partially compatible, to varying degrees. One can cross a horse with a donkey and get a mule, for instance, but the mule is almost always sterile. Still, a mule is very useful from this partially compatible cross, and so might a lily.

Two examples of partial compatibility:
Lilium ‘Mrs. R.O. Backhouse’ x (Lilium martagon ‘Amelita’ x Lilium ‘Super Tsing’)
Chaff on left, perhaps good seed upper right, likely not viable seed (but I will plant it anyway) lower right.


Lilium martagon ’Amelita’ x Lilium ‘Super Tsing’
Chaff on left, hopefully good seed on right. This may look like fairly good results, but often, when crossing genetically unlike parents (as these are), what seems like good seed doesn’t turn out to be. I had made this same cross years before, with similar results, but only 10 seeds grew. However, the pay back was fantastic!


Remember that off-color seed doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad. If the seed otherwise looks good, it probably is.
THis is blond seed from a complex martagon section cross. Can you see that most is good seed with just a little chaff?



Edited for grammar

Open pollination by natural selection and compatibility. This year I discovered something here quite by accident that by the numbers, has to be more than just a coincidence. That is: on stems left to open pollenate, there was a least one fully developed pod with good seed. The number of pods didn't matter, nor did the location on the stem, whether it was five or fifteen, there could be fourteen duds but always one or two big, beautiful pods full of assumable good seed. Upon further observation, if there was more than one pod, the pods would be in line--that is pollination must have occurred pretty much at the same time. And, generally, this seemed most prevalent to an area about 25 X 25 feet, give or take few. Crazy! It's something I've never seen before. But then, I've always snapped off unwanted seed pods in previous years. Could it be I've got a universal pollinator somewhere in there? I should mention, these are Division VI Trumpet/Aurelian seedlings, no more than two sisters alike.

The pictures are not the best, because the fully developed pod is farthest away from the camera lens making it look relatively and comparatively smaller, but you'll get the idea.

Photo of two well developed in line pods with good seed with duds before and after.

Here is something you wouldn't expect:
Two hand pollinated pods from the same plant. The small pod pollinated on 4 July, the large on 6 July.


Which would you guess had more good seed? (I had to break the small one to get the seed out.)

The small pod had eight. The large pod had one, and only questionable at that!

Thinking about next years work.

Pod parent:








XX these two as pollen parents:

More work waiting in here.

Lorn!!! That last one is so close to my ideal for aurelian-style flowers - the shape, the colouration... just perfect!

A penny for your thoughts . Seed from the same cross. Seedlings just entered (n + 1).

Same cross, but unprotected or with mixed pollen.

Do I get two pennies?

The Cockers produced 'Kathy Jan' and 'Dots and Dashs' from the same cross.

There's a cuckoo in the nest.

Coming from Australia, that is doubly funny!

Rick--Single pollen, hand pollenation with typical reasonable and practical control protection. I don't peel back petals and protect the stigma, etc. until it's easily accessible, so technically I suppose one could call it a 'dirty pollenation'. But I wasn't looking for a technical answer but rather 'what is the first thing that comes to mind' when you see something like this.

Hence, 'a penny for your thoughts'. A penny for mine---.

With me, I've always had a likeness for the one single, drastically different seedling that appears within a seed lot. So, when I see this my first thoughts are, I wonder what that one will be like and I wonder who the pollen parent is. It will be a real surprise for sure and until it blooms it will hold me in the mystic of the unknown. It adds a second dimension of interest away from the ordinary ho-hum of growing seedlings with me. Something I look forward to. Of the 40 or so (n + 1) pots I have out there right now, there are 16 with one or two seedlings each that appear way outside the usual bell curve distribution. That's 16 little value added reasons that make hybridizing so interesting to me.