What Smell??

[Leafmite]

My dad grows the tea roses, all fragrant, about fifty different types. They are still out there but when buying, you've got to go somewhere reliable. I just have a couple.
Brassavola Little Stars 'Yasuji Takaeki' and Angraecum magdalenae are great night-scented orchids with slight day fragrance. Both are moth-pollinated. Burr. Nelly Isler smells wonderful--early part of the day. I collect fragrant plants. The best one? Allspice!

[catherinecarney]

H gang--

Sorry I've been offline all weekend--been coaching a meet (gotta love the smell of the pool at 7 AM every morning!).

NY Orchidman--Geranium is a daffodil cultivar, white petals with a small (tiny) orange cup. It blooms fairly late in the season, and has a wonderful fragrance.

King of Orchid Growing--sorry to hear that Bletilla is potentially losing fragrance due to selection for other factors....There's a growing interest in fragrance in some gardening circles (especially people interested in heritage roses), and hopefully there will always be people in the orchid world who will work to preserve and promote fragrant cv's as well....

Catherine

[Leafmite]

I find it disappointing when I buy an orchid that is said to be fragrant and discover that the one I bought was bred for other factors and is a dud in the fragrance department. You really have to look closely at the parents or the plant from which it is cloned. The very best is to smell the flowers before buying...my zygo Kiwi has a wonderfully strong fragrance (the vendor's wife loves fragrant zygo's so they try to breed for fragrance).

[lornaheath]

Is it a foregone conclusion that if the Mother plant has a great fragrance, then any clones will have as well?

If that is right, then how difficult would it be to buy that cloning paste to make keiki's and get bizzy making Babies !

I know it would tak a year or two to get decent flowering plants, but at least you'd know what you were getting.

Does it work like that?

Lorna
x x x

[NYCorchidman]

Lorna- I believe keiki paste is mostly for phals. You rub some paste on the flower spike and it may or may not produce keikis.
It will take more than two years before you see them flowering.

Transfer of fragrance trait is rather complex. If one of the parents is fragrant, their offspring can take up that trait but not always. It is not that simple.

---------- Post added at 09:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:17 PM ----------

Originally Posted by catherinecarney

H gang--

Sorry I've been offline all weekend--been coaching a meet (gotta love the smell of the pool at 7 AM every morning!).

NY Orchidman--Geranium is a daffodil cultivar, white petals with a small (tiny) orange cup. It blooms fairly late in the season, and has a wonderful fragrance.

King of Orchid Growing--sorry to hear that Bletilla is potentially losing fragrance due to selection for other factors....There's a growing interest in fragrance in some gardening circles (especially people interested in heritage roses), and hopefully there will always be people in the orchid world who will work to preserve and promote fragrant cv's as well....

Catherine

I just googled up some image of geranium daffodil and I had them before as well. I thought it was a type of poeticus. lol

[catherinecarney]

My references list Geranium as a tazetta/poetaz type, but it's very possible (given the fragrance and flower shape) that it has poeticus ancestry as well. Either way it has incredible fragrance and will always have a place in my garden (sort of like Den. kingianum on my windowsill)....

Just like with any other trait, genes may or may not express in the offspring even if the parents have the trait--depends on whether the trait is dominant or recessive, if the parents are homozygous or heterozygous for the trait, whether the trait is controlled by one gene or multiple genes, and so on--and that's completely ignoring the possibility of a random mutation! Add in the fact that not all of the offspring survive to maturity (how many of us actually sprout EVERY seed and grow it to flowering) and it's easy to see why it's tough to predict whether or not the traits we're breeding for will show up....

Let me give you an example from our Shetland sheep....In this breed, white is dominant to all other colors (basically it "covers up" all the other colors and doesn't allow them to be expressed), black is dominant to brown, and "greying" (at least 4 different forms of it that we know of) is dominant to solid colors....So, the odds of getting a solid brown sheep are pretty low unless you breed brown to brown...We bred a grey ewe (heterozygous for black, heterozygous for grey) to a grey ram (also hetero for both traits). The odds of getting a brown lamb out of that breeding were 1 in 16....Five months after the breeding, lo and behold, our grey parents had produced a lovely BROWN lamb....We repeated that breeding on three more occasions (it produced nice sheep with lovely fleeces) and got greys every other time....No, genetics is NOT an exact science, and there is no guarantee when working with living organisms EXCEPT that things will change and the unpredictable will happen....

But the lure of "what will I get?" is a powerful incentive to try our hand at a breeding program, be it plants or animals. Sometimes things work out the way we expect and sometimes they don't.

BTW, that unexpected brown lamb stayed brown for two years (which usually means that it's got its adult color) and then proceeded to grey (so it's now an "oatmeal" or "fawn" color). Go figure....

Catherine

[lornaheath]

Wow Catherine, I liked that Hun. Must have taken ages to write. I like that too.

You know what I'm gonna say next don't you?

I want a picture of the sheep please?

Lorna
x x x

[catherinecarney]

Genetics is a hobby of mine, and the color loci in Shetlands is pretty straightforward--1 gene with 2 alleles for the black/brown options, 1 gene with several alleles that control where the color is expressed for the white/greys options, 1 gene with a couple of alleles that "blues" the colors for the normal/steely option, and 1 gene with several alleles for spotting/patterns (yes, I have a ram that is dark with white markings--he looks like a little cow). Lorna, I'll see if I can get some pix to send to you--but I'll warn you I'm abysmal with technology.

One thing that has started to fascinate me about plants, and orchids in particular, is the possibility of random mutations which can completely change the flower shape (think of the peloric phalaenopsis cultivars) or color--and sometimes it may be just part of a plant that shows the mutation. It boils down to the fact that there's still a lot we don't know about the biology of living organisms....

I suspect that the genetics of scent in orchids is probably pretty complex with multiple genes at multiple loci impacting the resulting fragrance or lack of it. I say this because there are many cases where there are multiple cultivars with the same parentage and the fragrance they exhibit can vary widely (the Onc. Sharry Baby cultivars are an example of this). The more genes and the more locations you are working with the harder it is to predict what you're going to get, let alone breed for it....

That's why buying orchid seedlings and growing them out can be a risk--there's no guarantee you will get anything like the parent plants or even anything like what the grex has produced in the past. Don't get me wrong, you may get something very good, maybe even better than the parents, but depending on how the genetics fall out you may also get something completely unexpected. I know when I buy plants for fragrance I want to buy them in bloom if possible so I can actually smell them....

Catherine

[Ordphien]

This was an interesting read.
I don't have much to contribute other than...
I hate the way daffodils smell... I truly do..
Flowering bulbs in general have an unpleasant tinge to them.
I adore fragrance. It's a big factor for me.

I think fragrance is making a comeback.

Most of the new hybrids that come into my local nursery are significantly more fragrant than in previous years. Fragrance is becoming increasingly important in roses I believe.
I think now that we've opened the door a little more on form and colour breeders are once again focusing on fragrance.

And finally...
I have an extremely sensitive nose, and I can confidently say that I rarely ever come across a flower that does not have a scent.
However if I ask the people around me, most often no one else can smell it.
So even though I have no basis other than personal opinion, I think I'd agree that most flowers have a scent that people can't detect.
Mainly because I'm tired of feeling like I'm nuts for smelling supposedly un scented flowers.



Oh... and we do have begonias here! I myself have tons of tuberous begonias in my yard.
I can't grow garden basics though.... go figure.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

[Discus]

Originally Posted by Ordphien

I hate the way daffodils smell... I truly do..

Hyacinths...! PLEGH!!!!

---------- Post added at 03:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:11 PM ----------

Originally Posted by catherinecarney

One thing that has started to fascinate me about plants, and orchids in particular, is the possibility of random mutations which can completely change the flower shape (think of the peloric phalaenopsis cultivars) or color--and sometimes it may be just part of a plant that shows the mutation. It boils down to the fact that there's still a lot we don't know about the biology of living organisms....

Not to mention ploidy and the possibility of inducing it with e.g. colchicine.