The other night I gave a talk titled “Sentimental Hybridizing” and at the beginning of it I asked how many people had known Oscie Whatley. Only a few hands went up, I’m sorry to say. So while I remain on the long list of his surviving friends, I want to share an insight into Oscie’s own understated river of feelings for the people he knew.
Oscie was a warm and friendly person with a wry sense of humor and a strong habit of generosity. Anyone among his circle of acquaintances probably thought they were his friend, maybe even his best friend. As a hybridizer, though, he was guided by his methodical training as a manufacturing engineer. He loved the science of hybridizing, loved to use his microscope and conduct studies of this and that, loved to use risky chemicals to convert diploids to tetraploids and give himself opportunities for breakthroughs.
.
His daughter, Linda, loaned me Oscie’s garden notebooks a few years ago for study and analysis, and I began to make charts and lists of the plants he used, the plants he wanted, and the plants he selected. One thing that just came together for me the other night was the curious cartoon drawing of the late Jim McKinney on the cover of Oscie’s 1998 price list and the introduction of ROSE IMPACT that same year.
I had seen ROSE IMPACT in 1997 as a selected seedling. I fell in love with it. He said he wasn’t sure about registering it because he disliked veining. He did, however, separate a piece of the seedling for me and I built much of my hybridizing for the next five years around it. That’s the sentimental side of my story. I didn’t notice it was a bitone, didn’t notice the low bud count in my shady back yard, didn’t notice the light midribs. I just loved that rounded form from Tet. Siloam Apple Blossom, and that unique tangy color.
When I asked about the parents of it, Oscie just said “McKinney seedling” and left it at that.
Several years after Oscie died, I found a trail of the friendship with Jim McKinney in the notebooks. They had swapped plants and seedlings in the 1970s. I could see Oscie absorbing recommendations about voluptuous Louisiana daylilies. And then, in 1980, I noticed Oscie is planting seeds from Jim McKinney, what turned out to be part of McKinney’s last seed crop. Oscie brought them to flower, numbered the best of them, converted what he could, and in a 1983 map of his seedling crop recorded a seedling numbered “J-37” as a pod parent. The “J” I took to mean “Jim.”
He later used a conversion of J-37 as pollen parent in a cross with SEDALIA, and the resulting seedling was the pod parent of ROSE IMPACT. I can only guess that J-37 was a big pink flower and that the result of the cross with SEDALIA was a big flower, even though ROSE IMPACT is only 4” across. I found J-37 in a garden map within the notebooks.
Within my first seedling crop from ROSE IMPACT was a great big raspberry self that was larger than RI and its mate, COLLLECTOR’S CHOICE. It was the only big flower in that cross, and I knew it would become a registration. It proved hardy after a December transplant, vigorous, and a wonderful opener in St. Louis (though not in Portland, Oregon, where I sent it to my daughter for trial). I registered that seedling in 2010 as MOM’S MIRTH, named for the big sense of humor at the center of my mother’s nature.
I only realized today that the picture of Jim McKinney on Oscie’s 1998 price list was related to his introduction of ROSE IMPACT that same year. The flower stands as a silent memorial to a friendship cut short abruptly. Oscie surely had his friend on his mind that year.
