Breeding flowers is a numbers game. And a genetics game. And a
waiting game. Throw in a bit of artistry, and you might get
something worth selling. Then again, maybe not. While going to the
nursery and buying a pansy seems so easy, getting the pansy to the
point that makes someone want to buy it is anything but. It
involves painstaking work, patience and a lot of trial and
error.
Breeding flowers is a numbers game. And a genetics game. And a waiting game.
Throw in a bit of artistry, and you might get something worth selling.
Then again, maybe not.
While going to the nursery and buying a pansy seems so easy, getting the pansy to the point that makes someone want to buy it is anything but. It involves painstaking work, patience and a lot of trial and error.
In general, plant breeding goes something like this: Have an idea of what you want. Find two parent plants that have most or all of the characteristics that you want the offspring to have and cross them.
Wait.
When the seeds have formed, harvest and sow them.
Wait.
When the plants flower, choose which ones have all or most of the characteristics you want the offspring to have and cross them.
Repeat.
The hope is that eventually, all that plant crossing will yield a hybrid that has the qualities the breeder is after.
For Goldsmith Seeds on Hecker Pass, that’s typically a plant that’s short and full, with large flowers that appear early and in a wide range of colors.
It has to be strong – able to withstand shipping, life in the nursery before being bought and climates in front yards around the world. And it has to be reproduceable.
The plants are bred so that variability is removed, and the same parents will always produce offspring with the same leaf and flower color, size and pattern. That ensures consumers know what they are getting when they buy the seed.
But the process can take years, especially if the plant takes a long time to produce seed. Joel Goldsmith, president and chief executive of Goldsmith Seeds, said impatiens, for example, can grow from seed to plant and produce more seed in about six months. Cyclamen can take a little more than a year.
He said it takes an average of seven years from the beginning of the breeding process to having a product to sell. Plant breeders have made a hybrid in as few as three years, but the company also has one that breeders have been working on for 15 years.
“It’s going to be really good when we get it out,” Goldsmith said.
A plant breeder and the technicians that do the crossing have to be meticulous in their labeling, so that the lineage of a plant can be traced, making the product reproduceable. The seed from the hybrids generally won’t produce a plant that’s like the parent plant, so to continue producing the hybrid, the breeders must keep the parent plants around. And while they’re trying to come up with the final plant product, there can’t be any inadvertent crossing.
“It’s endless attention to detail. There’s very little room for error,” said Todd Perkins, a plant breeder who has been doing his job for 16 years. “You can lose six to 12 months if there’s any contamination. You can’t guess. You have to destroy it and start over.”
The number of seeds sown to start a breeding project is determined by the number of samples the breeder estimates will be needed for sample crossings to achieve the product. That’s determined by the genetic variables in the plants, and by experience.
“It’s a huge numbers game,” Perkins said.
The seeds from one plant crossing aren’t sown by the thousands – but they are sown by hand. In fact, just about everything is done by hand.
The breeders and the technicians who pollinate the flowers to produce the crosses are the painters of the floral world. The technicians’ actions, planned and tracked by the breeders, result eventually in the vibrant colors and hearty plants that catch the eye of the customer in the nursery.
The technicians are the ones who peel back the petals of a flower bud to remove the pollen-producing parts before they mature, to keep the flower from self-pollenating.
They are the ones who, using paintbrushes and tweezers, take the pollen from one flower and place it in another.
While the process is delicate, it’s also brutal. Plants that aren’t up to par are unceremoniously tossed.
“If it’s not performing, it’s out the door,” Perkins said. “I don’t entertain losers. You can’t compete against the best.”
But a lot of plants do make it.
“To think about the breadth of material that is successful – I’ve been doing this a while, and it still blows me away,” Perkins said.
Goldsmith Seeds, which has been around since 1962, has six breeders at its Hecker Pass facility and six at a site in Holland. It has a site in Guatemala with numerous workers, but that site is for seed production, and does not have breeders based there.
When all the breeding produces a flower that’s almost ready to go to market, it gets tested outside in places around the world to see how it would do when someone plants it in the yard.
If there are no major problems, the plant can end up at the retail site where an amateur gardener can pick it up to add some color to the planting bed.
And the colors are numerous, from purple and orange violas to bright red geraniums to pale pink impatiens. But it’s blue that draws people’s eyes. Blue is the “magic color,” Perkins said.
Still, with all the crossing and breeding, breeders haven’t managed to produce a blue geranium, he said. Perkins held a cool pink geranium flower between his fingers. “You can see the blue in there,” he said.
But breeders haven’t been able to strip the rose-color away to isolate that blue.
Yet.
