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.