Hibiscus: Texas Star Hib winter Question, 1 by JLD_II

JLD_II wrote:
vs71099
Your absolutely correct, those seeds are "Like a box of choolates...You never know what your gonna get". LOL Well that isn't exactly true. When I 1st started collecting seeds, I only had white, pink and maroon giant hardies. For some very odd reason, my 1st maroon/red would never produce seeds. The white 1 did and the results were either giant white, red/maroon or white with pink center. So the seeds were predictable to the extent of knowing you'd get those 3. The picture below are the 3 flowers I'm trying to describe.
Shortly after growing some from seed plus we bought another small red/maroon (which I'll call red from here on out), the new reds started producing seeds too. I have no explanation for why the 1st red never produced seeds, very odd IMO.
We haven't had time to grow out seeds collected from all the other colored hardies I posted in the collage above. I've gotten some new reds and pinks. Red Texas star, Disco belle red, a deep pink w/o a tag and a couple others in between. I wished I knew the propper names for them, I'll post them individually soon and find out what they are. I've collected so many new seeds from all these new colors and made sure I labled them correctly from where they were collected from. So this next spring we'll find out how much more variances I'll get from these as they're all naturally cross pollenated.
I would bet we could better predict the outcome of collected seeds if we grew them in a way that would make sure we knew where the pollen came from but that isn't an option.
So we end up with a bunch of hybrids which isn't such a bad thing as we also get whats called "Hybrid vigor". That's just a fancy name for explaning how the majority of the seedlings can turn out stronger plants as the better genes from the parents tend to be dominant if I understand correctly. I can't wait to see what these new seeds will do, hopefully they'll turn out nice. Time will tell.
I'll have a bunch of seeds to trade, I have little paper bags/plates laying all over the place! LOL I need to gather them all up to get organized ASAP.
Thanks, JD