Kevin,
A 10" flower, now that really would be something wouldn't it! Look out Irises haha I'll edit that in just a moment.
I hope you like those purple sepals on the tectorum photo I posted, that's from one of your 'Borscht' siblings, the flowers almost look purple to as they are a darker pink with purple structures holding up the pollen and dark polen sacks to cast purple shadows on the petals. I crossed that one with lion king this summer, it is VERY dark purple all year. I remember you saying that the albinism in the white arachnoideum flowers could be coralated to the rosette's lack of color, perhaps the opposite (but same principle) is causing these tectorum flowers to be so dark, and maybe that purple hue could be advanced even further till the flowers were unmistakably purple?
So cantabricum, medium under 10" with loose branches full of flowers that look like this...
(a photo Lynn posted of one of the selections) would you say this white/tan/pink flower is accurate? I did have a great big 'Lion King' bloom last summer but I can't remember the flower color. Like you, I'd never put much thought into the blossoms before about halfway through this season and lion king had already done its thing by then. I did notice a few standouts in the bloom department in 2019 and tried to self them, but hadn't taken photos till this year. I think next season I'll try to document every bloom in the yard, it might give me an excuse not to cross all of them!
A field sounds appropriate for those big ones, can you imagine selecting for mound development?
I noticed the white blooming arachnoideum 'Albium' that Lynn mentioned was crossed with your 'Album' to produce 'Baby Boo'. Interesting as that is, unfortunately it's a white x white cross so it doesn't tell us much about the dominance of white arachnoideum blooms. However it's open pollenated seedling 'Shampoo' has bright pink flowers so white is likely recessive, not that it can be definitively said based on a single example.
I thought Whirl-i-gigs flowers looked like a distorted 'Cleveland Morgan', which is where the montanum suggestion came from. Color's the same to.
So marmoreums are contributing the pink to the grandiflorum's you have then? Any explanation for why Goldmarie has white blooms? I thought it was such a casebook marmoreum but I guess it is much larger than most.
I got this extremely wulfenii looking seedling from 'Grey Lady' x 'Lilac Time', I do plan to keep it because it's large and makes a nice tight mound fast. Perhaps I'll be surprised to find yellow flowers on it when it blooms...
I've never seen a pure wulfenii bloom, and as you'd imagine I would have expected them to be pink. 'Thunder' which we've pinned as a wulfenii x montanum has pink blossoms, since neither of those should be pink on their own, one has to assume theres a third species at work. Maybe the perpetual presence of pink flowers in most wulfenii descendants is because somewhere along the line the wulfenii genes paired with a tectorum and all of our tetraploid descendants have WT genes that continue to pair in each generation.
-Sol
