[pbs] Hyacinthus orientalis development
Diane Whitehead
voltaire at islandnet.com
Sun Oct 21 01:21:58 EDT 2007
This information is from The Development of Garden Flowers by Richard
Gorer, 1970.
- a product of Turkish gardening
- originally only 4 colour forms, a pink, a blue, and a single and
double white
- by 1725, 2000 named cultivars listed
- modern forms very much larger than the wild type and appear to have
collected many extra chromosomes
- wild form 2n=16, but cultivated plants have from 19 to 30.
- first triploid reported in 1870
- if this is true, then earlier cvs must have exhibited simple gigantism
- flower development seems due entirely to selection and crossing
selected forms, almost entirely by Dutch
- at one time the doubles which had two or sometimes three corollas,
were most popular, but waned in popularity and most are now lost.
Diane Whitehead
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