Viewing post #997355 by ARUBA1334

Tom.. I don't know what do with that one yet maybe Kieth's (Espionage) to see if I can improve the plant but if it looks the same in May it will get put on lot's of different things and a sib cross with it may happen . With a lot of these crossed in 2013 I was looking for something that was a excellent parent for form and growth that would let me pass lots of different colors and patterns onto it and keep all those good qualities in tact. A good example of what I wanted to find would be Kieth's ( Silk Road ) the 06-77 plants that he has introduced are a wonderful assortment of colors and everyone of them is perfect (Branching, Buds, Growth) it is stunning to see them all in clumps in his field. I spent hours over them wishing they were in my garden so I could put pollen on them so glad my favorites of those got names and I can pollen daub with them in May

I had a lot of surprises this year and this was one of them when they started blooming the fun part of using the newer plants in crosses is the pedigrees are such a mix of different lines and genes you don't know what you will get this is one example. I crossed (Raging Tide) onto (First Avenue) looking for Ruffled Blue's... Raging Tide is a excellent grower here and I have seen a lot of good plants come from it and ( First Avenue) is another one that is mostly Keppel genes and when I read the pedigree the pod parent was a sibling to (Silk Road & Bollywood ) and it grows well here so I thought let's see what happens.

The majority of these when they started blooming were unimpressive but about the 3rd or 4th one a Plicata popped up which was surprising because I thought in order to get a plicata you must cross directly onto a plicata so the next day I came out to see what else had opened and there was another plicata there I couldn't understand where they were coming from so I came inside and looked it up in our database here on ATP the pedigree of (First Avenue) is Keppel 00-257K, Bollywood sibling, X Keppel 02-204A: (99-117B: (Crystal Gazer sibling x Poem of Ecstasy) x Dance Recital) basically seedlings crossed together there is no plicata in there directly or( Raging Tide) but when I clicked on (Poem Of Ecstasy) it led me to a plant introduced in 1982 called (Merry Madigal) and it comes from a seedling crossed with (Stepping Out) so I found my Plicata Lines or at least I think I did. I ended up with 3 plicata's blooming out of the bunch the one with yellow standards was kept to work with and the other 2 discarded because the form was so bad so what will be interesting is if I cross ( First Avenue) directly onto Plicata's or them onto it will I continue to get Plicata's or was this just me getting lucky and hitting the right combination of gene's. Another project for the spring

(First Avenue X Raging Tide) 13-55