HOW TO HYBRIDIZE A GARDEN PLANT IN YOUR BACKYARD GARDEN.

Breeding a commercially successful and stable hybrid is usually expensive and laborious, but the non-professional gardener can have fun experimenting with this technique.

Some genera, such as dahlias, irises, or roses, lend themselves to hybridizing on a non-professional scale, often producing quite pleasing seedlings.

Indeed, non-professional gardeners originally produced many hybrids that are now on the market.

Home hybridizing is not very complicated but requires a methodical approach and a great deal of patience.

It helps to concentrate on one species or genus.

Have a specific aim to produce plants that are hardy and resistant to many varying conditions.

It requires some research to find out if the characteristics that you are aiming for in the hybrid are evident within the species or genus.

Then select parents that may be of interest and start hybridizing, crossing, and backcrossing, selecting and reselecting the progeny.

Although plants may differ in their flower forms, the hybridization procedure is the same.

Useful tools include;

Small line paintbrushes for transferring pollen
a pair of strong tweezers and fine,
sharp scissors
labels
fine net or muslin bags to place over pollinated flowers
and a notebook to record all the crosses.

The exchange of maternal and paternal genetic material in plants by the sexual production of seeds, is fundamental to a plants ability to adapt to environmental change, but it can be exploited to breed new plants (hybrids) with improved colour, form, habit, disease resistance, or scent to suit the needs of gardeners.

A hybrid is a cross between two different plants.

The differences may be minimal if the hybrid is between two selections of the same plant, or they may be more significant if the cross is between two species.

Occasionally, the hybrid may be between two different genera.

If hybrids are produced from crossing two unrelated plants, the offspring often have great vigour.

Conversely, if plants are self-pollinated for several generations, they tend to lose vigour.

In commercial hybridizing, parent plants are screened over time to ensure that they are stable and will breed true.

Two parents who each show some of the desired traits are selected.

One parent is usually chosen as the seed (female) parent and the other as the pollen (male) parent.

Flowers on the seed parent have their stamens removed as soon as possible to avoid self-pollination and are hand-pollinated with pollen from the pollen parent to guarantee the parentage of each seed.

The seed parent is also protected from contamination by insect pollinators by covering each flower with a bag or by keeping the plant under cover until seeds form.

It should be noted that;

Successful hybridizing requires two parent plants with stable characteristics, usually species or selections of a species from the same genus, or, less often, species from two genera.

When crossed, the parents will produce offspring with uniform characteristics, and the results will be the same from subsequent crosses.

This first generation is called the first-filial, or FI, hybrid.

If the Fl hybrids are cross-bred with themselves, the second generation, or F2 hybrids, will exhibit a range of forms of characteristics reflecting both the parents and the Fl hybrids in varying degrees.

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