Name: Anne Summerville, SC (Zone 8a) Only dead fish go with the flow!
Back in the olden days, 2009 to be exact, I grew the Morning Glory’s, Kikyo Zaki next to Fujishibori. In the Fall, I collected seeds from the arches, logged them into my seed catalog and promptly moved on to other things. Two years later, in Winter I was going over my catalog of Morning Glory seeds deciding what I wanted to grow that year when I noticed them again. I remembered that I had the dickens of a time getting the Fuji to make seeds because Fuji just wasn’t producing very much viable pollen so I figured that most of these seeds were probably pure Kikyo. Curious, I decided to host a “MG Grow Out” and had 6 friends willing to grow out at least 5 plants each so including myself I’d have 35 plants. I figured I had to do numbers to hopefully stumble upon a Kikyo/Fuji cross.
When they started blooming, people were posting pictures of the blooms. Much to my surprise and delight, about a third turned out to be absolute crosses. There were also a couple of ‘mutants’ too along with the biggest surprise of all, 4 pure whites. That really intrigued me because all the flowers on the white plants continued to produce pure whites where as on other plants, no other flowers on a single plants were identical. I requested that some of the pure white flowers be sequestered, tagged and hand pollinated to itself. I wanted some seeds! To be part of the grow out my volunteers agreed to send me at least half of any seeds collected from whatever plants I specifically requested.
Most crosses turned out to be pretty consistent as you can see in the pictures (1st picture) but some were interstellar. Besides the two white, two plants were sporadically producing split petals (2nd picture). Unfortunately no seeds ever came of these.
This year I’m growing out some F2 seeds of the pure whites (3rd picture) and to my utter delight they are staying pure white! The reason why I’m so excited by this is because I now may have a ‘tabula rasa’ so to speak with a known lineage! If the Kikyo/Fuji F3 prove to be pure white then it will be easier to ‘follow’ the genes of any crosses. I will of course be crossing some of the pure whites this year. Already I can’t wait for next year to come along!
Note about the 1st picture – these are screen captures of thumbnails and you will see obvious duplications – I have my camera set for exposure bracketing which helps in getting true color since most mid and low range digital cameras have great difficulty in correctly exposing the color purple. The camera takes 3 pictures in a row for each shutter push using different exposures.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
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