Cherry Broom

I've been at my new job a couple of years now.  One of the best parts about it is that I get to drive to work on country roads every day.  When you drive along the same stretch of road, you get plenty of opportunities to spot unusual plants.

In the middle of last year, I discovered a broom in a hardwood tree on the road to work.  I would see it every day for a few months before I stopped to see what species it was.  It is on a treacherous stretch of road with very little room to pull over.

It turns out that it is a cherry tree- Prunus avium.  This species is from Europe, but it has naturalized in the US in places with suitable climates.  The wild ones grow into large forest trees with smaller fruit than cultivated varieties.

Here it is from a different angle.  

Last winter, I collected scions to store in the refrigerator until spring.  When I brought them out to graft, however, I saw that they had already come out of dormancy.  I grafted them anyway, just in case.  They failed.  I've found that plants will sometimes come out of dormancy at the right time, even when they are being held in a constant cold temperature in the refrigerator.  It makes me wonder what other cues in the environment trigger the internal clock of plants.  Had it already begun the process in late winter, so it just followed through?  Or does it just somehow count the days?

Luckily, fruit trees are much easier to graft than conifers.  I will have a second chance to graft this plant again in late summer.  At that time of year, I can do bud grafting, which is actually easier.  I have a much better success rate with Prunus while using this kind of grafting. 

I have to ask myself if brooms like this one, or the plum I found a couple of years ago, will yield anything useful at all.  There are many ornamental cultivars of cherries and plums.  These, if they even bloom- will have simple, single flowers.  As I'm writing this, I wonder if these brooms could be useful for dwarfing rootstocks.  Or perhaps I could use them as breeding stock to cross with the more ornamental varieties that already exist.  When you combine plant hunting with breeding projects, it seems that there are so many possibilities- far more than one can explore in a lifetime.

Raw Materials

Sometimes, I find a mutation that isn't spectacular.  Normally, I might collect a cutting and just see how it does in the garden.  I may just let it grow there as an oddity.

Well, to be honest, it isn't like I am commercially producing these plants.  I have shared a few of them- but mostly, they just sit in my garden.  I have fantasized about starting a nursery, filled with odd forms of native plants- probably after I retire.  I don't know if such an enterprise would be very lucrative, but it might give me something to do when I'm an old man.

In the meantime, I just do this for fun.  I share my findings with friends and other plant geeks.  My understanding of the patent laws with plants is that you can't patent something you found in the wild.  If you spent effort breeding it, or it is a mutation you find among your cultivated plants, however, it is possible to patent the clone and make money from it.  Doing that doesn't seem likely to be worth the effort, unless you develop something really fucking amazing.

I have a few plant breeding projects going.  Hopefully, one will produce something spectacular in the future.  Mostly, I just want the satisfaction of making something spectacular.  it would be cool to see something in other people's gardens- people I don't even know- and be able to say, "oh yeah- that's my plant."

About 10 years ago, my friend Janet and I visited a stand of wild camas- Camassia quamash.  It is a native bulb in the lily family that was a food staple for North American native people.  I ate one once- raw.  It tasted like creamy dirt.  I wonder if I could sometime get an indigenous person to show me how you are supposed to cook them...

Wow.  I'm rambling this evening.  Allow me to get back to the point...

We found a camas with light blue flowers.  The petals had darker centers, and lighter color on the margins.  I collected the plant, since it was an interesting variant.  It wasn't particularly striking, but it was a cool flower.

A couple of years ago, I bought a pink-flowered Camassia leichtlinii (a larger species) from a vendor at a plant sale.  He had found it while plant-hunting, and had propagated loads of them to sell.

Three years ago, I decided to try crossing the pink-flowered one with my odd, light-blue form. Of course my light blue form died right after setting seed.  Damn it.

I've been waiting to see the flowers of the offspring until this week.  I have half a dozen plants, and one of them bloomed this year.

So far, the results aren't exactly jaw-dropping.  It could be my imagination, but I think I see some possibility in this line of breeding, however.  As the other plants start blooming next year, I will cross them.  In such crosses, the F2 hybrids are when you start to see variation.  My eventual goal would be bi-colored flowers.  I would like to see pink on the outside margins of the petals with a blue streak down the middle.  You can see a subtle version of that in these flowers.  A few generations of breeding might make that really pop out.

At any rate, projects like this give me something to work on during times when I can't find any new mutations.