Endless Pigment
(SDLG# EHPOI239)
Starting the day bright fuchsia pink with lavender edges, fading to pink-lavender petal and sepal centers with wide blue-lavender edges above green to chartreuse throat.
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Endless Pigment is a beautiful combination of bright pink and bluish-lavender that changes through the day, creating a range of phenotypes along the way. The picture above is in the afternoon, when the bluish-lavender is more exposed. Not as splashy as its illustrious pollen parent, Pigment Of Imagination, it is a much more reliable garden plant and has the blue coloring within its anthocyanic pigment, and shows color-changing traits. What it does have that POI lacks is an incredible plant that can greatly improve any breeding program for color-changers.
The use of pod parent Endless Heart, from the breeding program of Darrel Apps, has been a big help in producing interesting colors and forms, with rebloom, very vigorous plants and rust resistance. I used it extensively in the early phases of my program in diploid breeding with very good results. In many instances, I have been able to cross Endless Heart to lesser plants to greatly improve the plant traits and vigor while also retaining interesting flower traits, increasing rust resistance and rebloom. Endless Pigment is just one of many that I have produced out of Endless Heart that has exceeded my initial expectations.
Endless Pigment was bred in 2012 and germinated in 2013, going through four years of my rust resistance screening and showing A+ resistance all four years. It is one of many, many siblings, and is the one that I chose because of the nice flower form, the high rust resistance, the attractive plant with fast increase that doesn't die out in the center (and have to be divided every couple of years), that is highly fertile both ways, shows good reblooming traits and carries the bluish coloring of parent Pigment Of Imagination.
The high fertility of Endless Pigment, along with the high rust resistance and breeding value for the trait, means that it is an excellent plant to produce many seedlings to accelerate any color-changer breeding program. The fine plant traits mean that Endless Pigment is invaluable for enhancing the vigor and hardiness of color-changing lines, which often are not the best plants around.
While the rust resistance is extremely high, the thrips resistance is only moderate, but that can be corrected in the seedlings by mating Endless Pigment to a partner with higher thrips resistance. I have produced many lovely seedlings from Endless Pigment, with many showing equally high rust resistance and a fair number showing higher thrips resistance. The seedlings show wonderfully clear colors in a variety of shades and some have been even more bluish than Endless Pigment. Below is an example of a seedling from Endless Pigment that has shown very high thrips resistance, very high rust resistance and a very interesting blue-pink coloring that starts the day darker and finishes up with lighter, bluish edges.