2015 Year-end Update
Is 2015 Really Over?
I can't believe how this year has flown by. I have wanted to
get a blog post up for weeks, but the weather has held out beautifully and I
have continued to work outside. That has caused me to get behind on writing a
blog post. I wanted to touch base on some things though, and make a review
of the year. There will be a lot of hyperlinks sprinkled throughout the text,
so be sure to check those out for more reading opportunities.
I posted earlier in the year about culling for thrip
resistance in June here.
I had injured myself in March 2014 and couldn't work until the end of May. That
was a painful and frustrating time that made me loose out on a great deal of
gardening work. In May of 2015 I contracted a virus that was circulating in the
area and was unable to work for a month. That again put me far behind on spring
projects, as multiple projects from the previous spring were left yet again and
a few new ones went unfinished. I have done almost no Peony or Iris hybridizing
in two years, for instance. However, each year (2014 and 2015), from June
forward, I have been well and active and have produced huge hauls of seeds with
my daylily projects.
My target goal from the five year period covering 2010 to
2015 was to simply test a population of daylilies that I found interesting,
doing mass random samplings with some small amount of specific and pedigreed
breeding, and to make an assessment of what I still wanted to work with at the
end of the evaluation period. If I told you how specific and targeted my
"first project" was, and the five or six cultivars I bought to use
toward that end, you would probably laugh out loud. I know I do. Needless to
say, my focus has expanded since.
When I decided to actively breed daylilies in 2010, I first
purchased seeds from the Lily Auction, mainly diploids, while I made
purchases of cultivars for spring 2011 planting, and I kept seeds from some of
my favorite plants that I had been growing for a decade or four. I determined
at that time that as I added cultivars, they should be tested for a host of
points. Early in this blog, I wrote a post here about
the criterion for pod parents that I wanted to focus on over the ensuing five
year period. That article details all the selection points I have focused on
for the first five year period of information gathering with an emphasis on
pods parents, including plant traits, recombining ability and breeding ability
(for plant traits and flower traits), fertility and viability of seeds and
offspring.
So 2015 has been that fifth year, that culmination point
when I make evaluations and decide where I can move forward, and then from
there, of what I can move forward with: what still excites me. I am happy to
say that there are a lot of good daylilies out there. As with all things you
will have to go through a few to find the handful most exciting to you. And you
should do that. Once you have taken some time to experiment and trail things in
your own garden, you can find that set of individuals that you find interesting
enough for further development. It has been an exciting, but very busy year. To
me, this feels like the actual beginning of my own breeding program. Simply
put, I know what I want to work toward now, and now it is just a matter of
using the few things that match my interest and have proven useful in the last
five years of experimentation and information gathering. Of course, I am still
continuing to test a few new things every year.
Nothing I write on this blog is meant to be seen as more
than my thoughts. This is very much a reflection of my inner process, my
approach to breeding any plant genus I might work with. My thinking begins all
over the map, and it is only as I begin to gather experience with specific
cultivars, clones or seedlings that I can begin to formulate a focus-point. I let
the plants guide me as much as I guide them (maybe they even guide me more).
Nothing I am doing is extraordinary or unique. This is simply breeding and
selection. I have always considered field testing by simply growing plants in
my environment and observing their behavior with minimum intervention to be
important to determining those plants that flourish the best in my environment,
and thus are the plants I want to develop my own plant lines from. This
approach is based in my interest in scientific concepts such as Liebig's 'Law of the
Minimum' and my own interest in domestication and permaculture
models, as well as my interest in genetic
disease resistance research.
So this summer was wet and beautiful and I was able to set
lots of seed pods. I retired many, many breeders this year, especially amongst
the diploids. In many instances there was nothing wrong with them, but when you
have a lot of good material, you have to refine your criteria and make cuts.
Many of the plants I retired have been good plants and continue to be valuable
and interesting for their best traits. I still retain them and could always
choose to go back to them if I thought that were a good idea, but for the time
being, I want to only observe their seedlings in my garden and see where that
leads. My seed haul last year was ridiculous. I will call this year
semi-ridiculous, as I only did about half as many this year. One thing that is
absolutely clear from this year is that my number of cultivars used to produce
seeds, as well as the number or crosses and pods set has to be reduced and
focused over the next five year period. Thus, many retirements of good plants
from breeding rotation. Selection is the most powerful tool the breeder has.
I did see some rust in 2015, but it did not appear until the
second week of September - very late! The rust was shut down in November with
our first night in the twenties. I did manage to see rust in the seedling beds,
so there was an opportunity to give those seedlings their first culling for
high susceptibility. I did end up with a good amount of rust in my hybridizing
garden on the susceptible plants kept for that purpose, which allowed me to
make more observations amongst the population and to evaluate new acquisitions
for the first time. I can only reiterate the things I have previous said in
regards to rust. Some things repeatedly show resistance over many years, and
seem to be very consistent in their general resistance levels, while other
things vary from year to year. I can make no definitive statement as to why
this is so. I might suggest that there could be many factors, including
different genes for resistance to different strains of rust, with some possibly
having broader resistance and/or may reflect inadvertent resistance-gene
pyramiding (multiple genes for resistance in one individual). As well the
observed variations may represent reactions to different strains of rust, as we
have confirmation that there is more
than one strain of rust, and/or varying reactions based on the
environmental conditions form year to year. I suspect that there are actually
several answers, with all of the phenomena I just described likely occurring
randomly across Hemerocallis.
The most important feature of this selection, for me, still
lies in identifying those cultivars, clones and seedlings that seem to remain
highly resistant over many seasons of testing and, where the anecdotal
information is available, within many gardens. With rust constantly evolving,
we can assume that somewhere, at some point in time, all Hemerocallis may show
susceptibility to one strain of rust or the other. This is an inevitability,
and we should never delude ourselves otherwise. I view selection of rust
resistance as a competitive sport, played against the adaptational ability of
the rust pathogen. Any cultivar that has shown high rust resistance in multiple
years, even if it shows some susceptibility in some years or locations, may
still have important resistance factors to offer to the effort of selecting for
less susceptible lines and possibly even the pyramiding
of resistance genes. As always, I find the disposal of highly susceptible
seedlings to be important and I do find that there are consistencies amongst
resistance levels, even where their is variability, in those individuals I have
been observing.
The chart of resistance variations shown amongst the test
cultivars, which were infected with multiple accessions of rust as discussed in
the Buck et al 2013 paper, 'Identification of Pathotypes in the Daylily Rust
Pathogen Puccini hemerocallidis', would seem to suggest that the
variations of resistance/susceptibility to rust pathotypes shown by any one
cultivar is not extremely variable, even when variations in response are seen.
I can only conclude that selection for field-resistance to rust has a place in
plant selection, with the caveat that no observed resistance is
'permanent' or 'forever'. Eventually, all resistance must be toppled by new
strains of a given pathogen, though that process can take decades, as we see
with the wheat rust resistance gene which has been effective for the
last fifty years, but which has been loosing its resistance in the face
of newly
evolved strains of wheat rust in this decade. I can only conclude that
selection and breeding for resistance is a valuable point of plant selection in
Hemerocallis, so long as we remain realistic about its uses and limitations.
The weather so far this fall has been exceptionally mild.
Many daylilies are still green, even some of the plants that are normally
dormant. Winter starts in a few days. It will be interesting to see if it gets
colder or stays unusually warm. If it stays warm, it won't be a good year for
testing things for cold hardiness. I have all the seeds I will be planting
outside planted. Only the smaller amount that gets started indoors in February
are still to be dealt with, about fifteen percent of my total seed production
for 2015. It will be interesting to see how germination goes if the winter does
stay warm, and how much earlier than normal (which is generally Mid-April)
germination occurs as a result of the warmer weather. I will post if I observe
anything interesting or odd.
There are many points I hope to discuss in future blog
posts. This year has presented me with many tantalizing thoughts, but nothing
that has yet inspired me to sit down and take the time to write them out. I
find I can only do this when the inspiration is there along with complete
thoughts. Until I have a complete set of thoughts to express, I
prefer to ruminate on those thoughts in my head until they take coherent form
and I actually then have something I perceive as useful to say. I hope to have
some more blog posts for this winter, but that will depend on how the weather
holds out. If it remains good, I won't be able to constrain myself from getting
work done, as there are still things that I need to catch up on from spring '14
and '15. So to close out 2015, I wish you all luck in your life and your
projects and hope 2016 brings you the realization of your dreams!
