I've been thinking about this topic off and on since it started. I would imagine there are as many answers as there are hybridizers. Dipping into the realm of introducing can be exciting and terrifying. Registering is fun! After all that work you get to pick the perfect name for your seedling... and hope no one else thought of it first. Registering is also responsibility, recording the needed info during the previous years bloom season or even better over a period of years. It is, in my mind, also the hybridizers resposibility to know how to measure size of bloom and scape and what the definitions and characteristics are for the 6 very different distinct Forms. Introducing, to me, is a personal thing. Just as the reasons for the two flowers you crossed to get your promising seedling, the choice you made to select and keep it, maybe even breed with it, all personal. With that said, anything I have introduced or intend to will be a plant I enjoy seeing come up in the spring and when that first bloom is due to open each year I look forward to seeing it all the way through to it's last for the season. Sure I have a list of must have this - must have that, but if I don't like it, then it will eventually hit the compost pile. This past summer I had a known local hybridizer visit during bloom. This person walked around pointing to sdlg after sdlg, why aren't you registering that? When are you registering this? After scrunching my nose for the zillenth time or answering not enough branching, not enough buds, mungy color... I just said I don't like it. So my advice would be to have your list of what that sdlg must have, but at the same time don't pass a sdlg by that you really like or is deserving just because it doesn't fit all the checkboxes on that list( a Form you don't normally work with, odd color, smaller bloom than you would like). And trust your gut, if you really don't like the sdlg, don't let anyone talk you into introducing it.
I did something new this year, one thing that bothers me are the increasing numbers of registered cv's with, sdlg or unk listed as parents. One keeper sdlg had all the characteristics I wanted except the color is not to my likeing, The sdlg has been used in many crosses over the past few years with a large percentage of keepers. Because I work primarily with my own sdlgs the parentage on some is getting a bit long. I decided to register this one keeper and never introduce it. It now has a name and it's parentage recorded so future generations from it will also have their parentage searchable and I don't have the problem of writing a long drawn out parentage in all it's kids or resorting to the dreaded X sdlg (sdlg x sdlg). I will have to see if I continue this with other important seedlings in my hybridizing program, but for now I'm happy.
Registration is to keep order in the plant world, introducing is announcing that a plant is available to others.
