Pollination

Many of you may be interested in producing your own crosses of cultivars unfortunately sometimes the opportunity is lost due to the flowering occuring at different times, what you can do is collect and store the pollen for use when the time is right,a friend of mine has given her permission to post this link on her method of collecting and saving pollen.http://www.arghyagardens.com/pollencollect.htm

 

Walnut - what an excellent bit of information - thank you. I have never produced my own crosses - but it is something I would love to do. Its all a matter of finding the time, and not getting distracted by something else.

 

Hi Peter, it is really interesting it can become quite involved some of my brugs are self pollinating so you need to slit the corolla tube before the flower opens and the pollen has time to activate, remove the anthers, pollinate the stigma with your desired pollen then put a mesh bag over to stop any bee interference once the flower opens, I have had quite a few sucesses, it doesn't take long to actually do it the bit that takes the time is waitin for the seeds to develope planting and raising them to flower and seeing if you were sucessfull.

 

Walnut, when you say quite a number of successes, do you mean that something actually grew from the seed. Or do you mean that what grew was sufficiently different from the parents to be a new plant. Also are you crossing members of the same species or differant species. Presumably, even getting a cross species seed to grow would be success in itself.

 

Last year Peter I produced 4 different Brugmansia seeds from my pollinations my first I named after my wife but because I know some of the others have the potential to be better I will wait to see if they turn out better and perhaps give her name to a better one, then I will register it with abads (american brugmansia and datura society) if the are happy with the lineage then it stands.
There are 7 (wild) species of brugmansia 5 of them are self sterile they are capable of pollinating with their own species and are capale of cross pollinating with one another in that group of five producing a great many hybrids,the other 2 are self fertile and are capable of crossing with one another but not the other group, this group provides very strong colours and I am working with this group at the moment,what has been found is that a mix of pollens from the group of 5 with the group of 2 is producing some inter species crosses what happens the like pollen in the mix opens the receptor and the normally incompatable pollen finds a way in.
If any produce of these mixes produces a plant of outstanding qualities then the seeds of that plant are unlikely to produce a plant the same as that parent it would have to produce like from vegetative means (taking cuttings)
Another avenue being explored is using grafting techniques Daturas and Iochromas (both very closely related to brugs) are grafted to brugmansia root stock the results very very occasionally produce or hopefully produce a chimera,( grafting can cause a mix of homones creating this result called a chimera) the search is for the Blue Brugmansia.

 

Walnut that is clever. I knew that it needed the right chemicals in the pollen to open the stigma, but 'tailgating' by unwelcome pollen is very smart.

Also I didn't know that grafting could produce a chimera. I can see people getting very involved in both aspects. Many thanks.