my new adventures in pollination

On Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday, but dang these days flow into each other) morning I went outside for my daily walk around the garden, Asher joined me. Blair did too, but she always does. Asher joining me was out of the ordinary. And somehow it ended up being a science lesson hybridizing daylilies.

I keep wanting to do my on hybridizing, but if you want to do it right it's an involved process, and it takes several years. I actually made an effort a couple years ago. I got tags and I spent a bunch of time cross-pollinating. I got some good seeds. I wrapped them in damp paper towel, then in ziploc bags (which were properly labelled), and into the refrigerator. I forgot about them, and somewhere down the road someone threw them out.

Since then, I've been kind of lukewarm on the idea. I'd love to leave my mark on the daylily world. And I already have a few names that I'd like to use:

• Becky Bradshaw
• Heeblewenzinko D'Foogy
• Axiom of Choice
• One Dollar for the Post Stamp Cost

Anyway, back on Wednesday, as I was making my rounds and taking pictures, I started talking to Asher about pollination. I was showing him the stamens and the pistils. And I noticed that the pistils looked...receptive. It's something I had never noticed years ago, but this time I did. So I asked Asher if he wants to try pollinating. To show him, I pulled a stamen off a Flash of Javelins bloom, and brought it over to pollinate Spider Man. And then, with a stamen from Spider Man I returned the favor to Flash of Javelins.

Asher was into it. But his first attempt was to try crossing Flash of Javelins with Space Junk. And that gave me my opening to explain that there are tets and there are dips. You cross tets with tets and dips with dips. Not one with the other.* So I showed him that some of the ID tags have asterisks after the cultivar name to indicate that the plant is a tet. And he was off to the races.

The only problem with all of this is that I didn't have anything to tag the flowers that he had pollinated. So if I get any good-looking seed pods I won't know who the father is. And that means that if this is the fresh start of my hybridizing program, it'll start with incomplete parentage information. But (if the ADS database is any indicator), that's not an insurmountable problem.

I know myself well enough to know there's a really good chance that nothing will come of this. But I'll be checking for seed pods and watching them. And maybe when the time comes I'll be able to get Asher interested in hybridizing with me. This could be the start.

And maybe I'll finally be able to register a flower called "Lo K'darkah."

*For the reader who is not familiar, this has to do with the plant's genetics. Generally speaking, some daylilies are diploid ("dip") and some are tetraploid ("tet"). Tets have twice as many chromosomes as dips, so when you cross daylilies you need to match ploidy. Strictly speaking I think I recall hearing that under some circumstances you can cross a tet with a dip but you end up with problems. I don;t remember the details.