pardalinum said:Discussion along the lines of this thread should stay here in the forum.
Absolutely, and thus my "option" to skip to the last paragraph. My relevancy remark was meant as how relevant my thoughts were to actual outcomes. That the thought process is academic genetics.
Roosterlorn said:Are there some colors that tend to dominate in cross pollenation?
Orange tends to be a dominant color where it is present. I don't know about others; there certainly could be. I believe others have mention that there are.
what if I cross two pinks; what will I get? It's my feeling that I could get a darker pink than both parents but no lighter pink than the darker pink minus the lighter pink. Is that correct?
Perhaps, but it's not that straight forward. If color was that simple, then I am sure people (amateur and professional) would have bred darker improvements on the Midnight strain decades ago, simply by crossing and recrossing darker progeny.
And if the pink parents are hybrids, you return to the variables of a,b,c,d,e x a,b,c,d,e concept, with all kinds of possibilities. Somewhere in there are the possibilities of darker pink. Color is far more complex than a pink gene, a green gene, a red gene, etc. However, sometimes we get lucky, and it really is quite simple.
I don't understand your thinking when you say:
but no lighter pink than the darker pink minus the lighter pink --So if you crossed two dark pinks, almost of the same saturation, you would expect progeny no lighter than a very light pink tint? I would have expected you to say "but no lighter than the lightest pink parent".
Other important things to know:
--- there can be more than one gene for the same color, even in the same plant.
--- white is not the absence of color; it is a genetic code, too.
--- there are also genes thought of as color blockers, that prevent certain colors from being expressed, even though that particular color gene is present.
--- there is(are) such a thing as color enhancers, that affect colors and are not color genes. The results of my L. leichtlinii x L. maculatum cross may be an example. Yellow x orange = darker orange.
http://garden.org/thread/view_...
(sidenote: I see I had previously erroneously reported that the resulting flower aspect was "midway", but it is obviously "variable".)
