Cultivar Name: Cheddar Gorgeous
Seedling Number: AEIMPTSM 4
Bloom Diameter: 5.5”
Scape Height: 42”
Branches: 4
Bud Count: 18
Bloom Season: Early
Rebloom: No
Color/Description: Bright, saturated golden yellow
Ploidy: TET
Bloom Habit: ext
Foliage: Dorm
Fragrance: UNK
Pod Parent: (Ancient Elf x Implausibility)
Pollen Parent: Tetra Siloam Medallion
Year Bred: 2016
Rust Resistance: Unknown, produced after rust screening program had ended. Pod parent was a+/5 years, while pollen parent was consistently B-level through the four years it was in my screening program.
Fertile: Extremely fertile both ways, super pod producer.
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Comments: Cheddar Gorgeous lives up to its name. It produces a profusion of bright flowers that are quite open, with very thick substance. The vibrant, cheddar-yellow flowers are on scapes with 3 to 5 branches and tons of buds. It is also very fertile both ways and will produce a pod for almost every flower pollinated. The plant is large, the scapes are medium-tall, range from 45" in a really good year down to 34" in a year with severe, late, hard freezes in spring, and averaging around 42". The plant is very hardy and very vigorous.
What is most interesting though is the parentage. The pod parent was a full sibling to my 2023 introduction Implausibly Ancient, which combines two of the initial sepcies/near-species base plants I worked with- Ancient Elf and Implausibility - while the pollen parent was the tetraploid conversion of the famous Siloam Medallion, which is in the background of most of the big flat yellow tetraploids such as Supreme Empire, Butter Cream, Parabola, etc. I did not expect this result from this cross! I was not surprised by the color, but by the flatness of the flower, the wideness of the petals and the intense, thick petal substance. Those were all quite a surprise, to say the least. I made the cross to get better plant traits onto the Siloam Medallion type, but I thought I would have to make an F2 (at least) to see this good a combination of flower and plant traits. Cheddar Gorgeous is what I had in mind for the long term from the cross, it was just unexpected in the first generation, but most welcome.
Just a great all-around plant and a gorgeous display throughout its long bloom cycle, Cheddar Gorgeous is also an extremely good parent. With the high fertility you can produce a large number of seedlings, and that allows a lot of potential recombinations. I have mainly bred its with yellow, orange and red partners and have gotten some gorgeous seedlings with big, modern shaped flowers with great substance on big, robust plants with tall scapes and high vigor. One interesting trait of Cheddar Gorgeous is that it shows partial darkness to the scapes and buds, and carries the recessive dark scape trait, producing seedlings with much darker scapes when mated with another carrier or fully-dark scaped type. With two grandparents of near-species type, Cheddar Gorgeous also transmits high vigor and robust plants with tall scapes and great plant traits deriving from those near-species ancestors, while also transmitting the advanced flower traits coming from the tetraploid conversion of Siloam Medallion. Multiple Photos below.
%2020230618_(AE%20X%20IMP)%20X%20T%20S%20MEDALLION%20DRK%20SCP%20HYB%2011.jpg "Cheddar Gorgeous")
%2020230615_(AE%20X%20IMP)%20X%20TSMED%20DRK%20SCP%20GOLD%20YELLOW%20SDLG%20WEST%20SDLG%20BED%2011.jpg "cheddar gorgeous")
%2020230615_(AE%20X%20IMP)%20X%20TSMED%20DRK%20SCP%20GOLD%20YELLOW%20SDLG%20WEST%20SDLG%20BED%201111.jpg "cheddar gorgeous")
%20X%20BUTTER%20CREAM%2011.jpg "cheddar gorgeous")
