Galanthus February 2008

[snowdropman]

Martin - small is beautiful - just love your "dinky nivalis X plicatus hybrid" - any chance of getting a bulb?

[David Quinton]

Martin,

I'd be happy to grow any of those shown. They are all fantastic.

John,

I agree with your ranking but it seems such a shame to place any one of those above another.

How was Anglesey Abbey? The weather up here was fantastic today and I'm sure that you and Ian must have got some great photos.

David

[Martin Baxendale]

Martin - small is beautiful - just love your "dinky nivalis X plicatus hybrid" - any chance of getting a bulb?

Chris, I'll have to chip the bulbs first; there's only one mother bulb and two small offsets still attached but already producing flowers (which makes me think it'll be a very free-flowering plant if it flowers on small offsets before they've even separated from their mother!)

I've potted the bulb so I can feed it and hopefully this year the offsets will be big enough to chip along with the mother bulb. So if you can wait a while, I'll keep you in mind.

That's the trouble with raising seedlings, as opposed to finding clumps of snowdrops in old gardens or churchyards etc. The seedlings are very healthy and new, but when you first see them flower and spot a good one, you've only got one bulb, which then needs to be laboriously bulked up (and you don't see it flowering again while it's being chipped). On the other hand, discovering an existing clump of something new means you don't have to wait while you bulk it up, but it might be decades old and already ageing and prone to disease. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. But it does make seed raising a very long process, especially with snowdrops which tend to be small bulbs, compared to say daffs. You could be talking, from pollination to having a small clump through chipping, as much as eight or nine years, maybe ten or more if the seedlings are slow to mature and flower (which some hybrids are) 

[snowdropman]

Martin - thanks for keeping me in mind - it was small snowdrops, like yours, that got me interested in collecting snowdrops in the first place, so always have a soft spot for them!

[Martin Baxendale]

Martin - thanks for keeping me in mind - it was small snowdrops, like yours, that got me interested in collecting snowdrops in the first place, so always have a soft spot for them!

Chris, I love the little ones too. One of my aims (in addition to breeding big strong grow-anywhere snowdrops for gardens, and much more) is to produce a range of dinky little snowdrops with a nice variety of flower shape and markings, ideally suited to pot growing, troughs, and of course showing, perfect for alpine gardeners etc. etc.

[Diane Whitehead]

Some of my grocery store elwesii pots have small plants in them.
I thought at first that they were perhaps just young, and would get
bigger in a couple of years.

Then I saw this one, and decided maybe that is not so.  This must
be mature enough to produce a second bulb, of the same size, so
I guess the other small plants might also be small, not young.

The flower tip is 9 cm high, and the leaves 5 cm, though I think they
will continue to grow.

[Diane Whitehead]

How about a plicate flower?  I hope someone is not going to tell
me that it is just getting old.

I have two such flowers, from the same bulb, each with the
rims of its petals folded up.

[Martin Baxendale]

And your small elwesii has twisted leaves and a gracilis-like mark, plus outer segments which look more gracilis-like than typical elwesii. Fascinating! Are the leaves convolute or applanate? They look convolute-ish in the pic but I can't see clearly. If the leaves were applanate, I'd say you had a very broad-leaved gracilis. But if convolute, then a very gracilis-like elwesii. Whichever it is, it's a nice-looking plant.

[Diane Whitehead]

One leaf is definitely wrapped around the other.

[Paul T]

Martin,

Given all the wonderful seedlings you are finding amongst your own sowings..... if you're hard up for money at any point I think you'll be able to raise some just by selling any spare seed you have.  Given some of hte beauties you're growing I'm sure a lot of us would be interested in trying, although I guess those with easier quarantine conditions would just hassle you for bulbs of them! (and so would I if I could!!  ).

Thanks for sharing your pics with us.  They all look great.  I'd be hard pushed to name a favourite.... love the lost of them.  That plicatus with the big blowsy flowers is impressive, but so is the tiny one, and 3269, and..... 

[Brian Ellis]

You could be talking, from pollination to having a small clump through chipping, as much as eight or nine years, maybe ten or more

Martin you have proved it is well worth the wait with such wonderful results.

[Hagen Engelmann]

Chris and Martin,

here is another very small plant, came from austria. Because of it glassgreen leaves, I called it for trial GRÜNER WINZLING.

[Martin Baxendale]

Paul, if I ever manage to raise tetraploids, then larger scale seed production would be one definite plus. At the moment I do thousands of crosses with the existing big triploid cultivars and diploids to get maybe just a hundred or so seeds in a poor year (perhaps double that in a good year) And then they don't always all germinate!

[Paul T]

Good grief, that few seeds?  So what causes the poor fertility in the "modern" hybrids... I'm assuming it is the ploidy problems?  What brought this about, or was it just slection for the biggest and best which meant that those happened to be the ones that were expressing the extra polidy?  Or perhaps I should be asking this in the hybridisation thread?

[Martin Baxendale]

Yes, many of the biggest and best classic garden snowdrops are triploids with very low fertility, and even those that are diploid and theoretically more fertile often seem reluctant to set much seed even when hand-pollinated. Others are infertile diploid hybrids which set virtually no seed at all. I'm crossing triploids onto diploids and (very long shots, as you get almost no seed) triploids with triploids, plus a few diploid with diploid crosses every year. The crosses involving triploids in particular involve many repeats of the same cross with lots of flowers in the hope of just a few seeds (often none at all). And on top of that, there's the problem of getting enough pollen to do the repat crosses - many of the best snowdrops produce very little pollen (probably as a result of their low fertility). And when you do get a successful pollination, you may only get a dozen or so seeds (sometimes less) from a snowdrop pod, compared to lots more from a narcissus seed pod and hundreds from a lily seed pod.