DG Site Updates: 30,000 year old plant seeds grown!, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Frilly,

It is true that tissue culture does tend to produce a higher than normal number of mutations. That is a bad thing if you are buying a named variety, and the plants you get are from TC, and you get a mutation of the named variety instead of the named variety that you ordered and paid for.

But tissue culture induced mutations can be a valuable tool in plant breeding. Daylily breeders deliberately cross different specimens and grow seeds from them, fully expecting and hoping for new forms from which to select something special. It is a bit ironic that on the one hand they want new forms and on the other hand they don't. If I were breeding daylilies, I would be doing my own tissue cultures, and I would be looking for any interesting new forms that arose out of that.

But I understand that Tissue Culture is an issue with daylilies, and this is a message thread in a different forum that discussed that, with several different viewpoints being expressed.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/daylily/msg041521222...

Tissue culture does have advantages for daylily propagation, and for some people those advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

http://www.gemination.com/

The attached picture is of a zinnia mutation I had last year. I like it a lot, but I realize that if you bought a package of zinnia seeds expecting conventional zinnias, that you might consider this as "defective" and simply pull it up. I selfed it and crossed it with other zinnias, hoping to see more like it this year.

ZM
(not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)