All,
Attached is a photo of what I think (hope) is the first N. serotinus that I’ve flowered. The perigonial tube is looking like an inverted wine bottle, which is characteristic of this species, correct? The scape is also the thinnest, most threadlike of any daffodil that I’ve grown, even more so that N. miniatus. I’ll have to see how it looks when the flower opens, but I fear it won’t look pretty after I harvest the anthers.
I also have a question about ‘Grand Monarque’. There are numerous registered seedlings from it, but do we know what it’s passing down to these seedlings, as far as chromosomes go? With 31 + 1B chromosomes, I’m assuming that ‘Grand Monarque’ has two sets of N. tazetta chromosomes and one set from N. papyraceus plus 1 B chromosome. It would be interesting to do a karyotype analysis of all of the new descendants of ‘Grand Monarque’ and compare what they received from their maternal parent.
Ross
Hi Ross,
Looks like N. serotinus to me.
The question about Grand Monarque is an interesting one. We can assume it is one part paperwhite and two parts tazetta – WTT. I found it to be hopelessly sterile and gave up on it.
By comparison Polly’s Pearl is two parts paperwhite and one part tazetta i.e. WWT. It is quite fertile but it almost always breeds as if it is a diploid paperwhite. Bill Welch said he bred some of his best paperwhites from what he called his Australian paperwhite and Polly’s Pearl.
I haven’t seen enough seedlings from my Gramon series, which I assume are also WTT like Grand Monarque. I suspect WTT can pass on just a complement of T chromosomes but think it is more the exception than the rule. Judging from the photos on Daffseek, Cabrini and Luna’s Favorite don’t look like fertile diploid tazettas to me.
It is not obvious that any of the Grand Monarque seedlings listed on Daffseek are fertile. There are two which read “Seed Parent (Grand Monarque x unknown )” but I think we can be sure that this means Grand Monarque is the seed parent and the pollen parent is unknown.
Maybe Grand Monarque can pass on 10 or 11 chromosomes but this looks doubtful in the cases of Cabrini and Luna’s Favorite. If it passed on 2 x 10 one would expect the seedlings to be fertile. I have seen the pollen of Nickelodeon and Fencourt Jewel and neither is fertile. If I had to guess I would say Grand Monarque passes on an irregular complement of chromosomes. It is a difficult parent and probably a very difficult if not impossible grand parent.
Hi again Ross,
I haven’t seen enough of the seedlings from my Gramon series but I do have some old flowers from bulbs that were planted very late. The pollen from these flowers is variable, some look good and some don’t. There is a constant theme: – they have some fertility but that fertility is slight; and the pollen grains that do sprout are of similar size to those of a diploid tazetta i.e. haploid. (Polly’s Pearl in contrast behaves as a reliably fertile paperwhite.)
If Grand Monarch is similar to the Gramons then this would suggest Fencourt Jewel might have about 24 chromosomes. My suspicion, however, is that to be pink Fencourt Jewel must have a paperwhite component. This complicates matters.
These results suggest that Cabrini and Luna’s Favorite are worth checking for fertility. If they aren’t fertile we can speculate they were selected as superior because they had a higher ploidy than 2 x 10.
It may be a sad rule of thumb that the best tazettas are sterile.
Hey Lawrence,
I finally did a nose count; I’ve got somewhere around 75 heirloom Dutch tazettas in the collection. Really there more than that as I’m still sorting and didn’t bother with paperwhites or a few ubiquitous ones. Off the cuff guess, five distinct paperwhite strains. Yellows, both strongly colored and pale sulphurs, I’m still sorting through but towards 20. White tazettas, with very pale coronas that fade quickly, 10 to 15-ish. White-oranges are the fewest, less than 10. The rest are all 8W-Ys (35+ varieties). Seed setters to date have been a number of yellows, a few oranges, NO whites and ONE bicolor. Paperwhites vary. The two white tazettas that are closer to their paperwhite heritage in form, growth habit, division rate, scent, do not set seed. [The one “domesticated” bicolor tazetta, from Turkey, also sets seed, rarely.] [The most solid tentative identification I’ve made is for a very ‘modern’ form dwarf 8W-O that won its debut award in 1890; I strongly believe all the others pre-date it.]
So I don’t know if the ‘best’ tazettas are all sterile, but a bunch sure are seed sterile and always have been… (so how did the Dutch keep bringing so many to market for so long-?)
Lawrence and Sara,
Thanks for the comments. It would be interesting to do a karytype of these different tazettas. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it at home, but haven’t quite made it there yet, if it is even feasible. Maybe there is a commercial service that would do it. Another problem is that I don’t yet have any of the cultivars bred from Grand Monarque. I do have an assortment of different Autumn Colors and heirloom tazettas. I think that some of them are triploid tazetta/paperwhite hybrids. The ones whose pollen I’ve looked at under a microscope all appear to have smallish diploid pollen, though.
The Y-Y and Y-O tazettas are an interesting case to me. The subspecies aureus they come from is said to have 22 chromosomes, like paperwhites. I’ve wondered if these might be a lineage of N. tazetta that’s more closely related to N. papyraceus, or, since they have yellow in the perianth, they might have preserved the yellow trait that was present in the common ancestor of all daffodils and Sternbergia, but lost in all the other species in subgenus Hermione.
Ross
I left the pollen incubating overnight. 12 hours later the situation is much more complicated, with not just smaller grains sprouted but also larger ones. This better corresponds to my feeling that the Gramons are unreliable strange parents.