mom2cjemma said:If you find those two parent cultivars and then breed those two parents, and end up with what appears to be that cultivar, can you call it that?
The simple answer is no, you cannot call it by the same name.
I am also thinking that this could be a several year process and I might get lucky in the meantime and find the plants I am searching for...... maybe.
If you produce enough seedlings you may get a seedling that seems to match the registered one, but it will never exactly match it. The only time two individuals exactly match is when they are identical twins or clones.
In the example, the seedling that appears to be the cultivar is a sibling and like human siblings even though it is very much like the cultivar the probability that it is the same is exceedingly small. If the plants are diploid then that probability could be approximated as 1/(4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4). There are 11 chromosomes and if we treat each chromosome as a unit (an over-simplification) and each parent as having two different chromosomes for each of the 11 pairs then that works out to be one in 4,194,304. If the plants are tetraploids then it becomes much more complicated. Again making all sorts of simplifying assumptions the probability could be 1/(4 x 4 x 4.... x 4 x 4) except in this case there are 22 fours or it could be 1/(36 x 36 x 36 .... x 36 x 36) with 11 thirty-sixes or something in between.
