A rare seedling

Dad and I plant trees every year on our property.  He does more of it than I do, since I am only up there visiting him for a week during the tree planting season.  We buy our seedlings from a nursery called Plants of the Wild.  Every year, we plant a couple of thousand seedlings of various native conifers.  Whenever we make the drive to Plants of the Wild to pick up the trees, I find myself wishing that I could spend a few hours looking through their seedlings.

In my own experience with growing native plants from seed, I've found a few cool things like that variegated Lonicera.  My thought is that mutations that might not survive in the wild are much more likely to make it in cultivation.  If you could look through thousands of seed-grown plants, you'd be more likely to find interesting mutants than if you spent the same amount of time looking out in the woods.

This year, I asked Dad to carefully watch the seedlings that he plants, just in case an interesting one was in there.


He called me a couple of weeks later to tell me about a spruce with yellow branches.  I asked him to pot it up and save it for me.

The pale branches have burned a little in the sun, but the ones with both green and yellow/white needles seem to be ok.  I will need to watch this plant for a while and see what develops.  It might just revert to green, or I might be able to select some variegated branches out of it for a new cultivar.  As always, only time will tell.

The moral of the story, of course, is that one must always keep an eye out for mutants- they are everywhere!