Practical Gardening
VIRTUALLY all flowering plants can be grown from their seeds. Transporting seeds was the major method of getting new species back to Europe during the 1800’s in the halcyon days of plant collecting.This included species of trees, shrubs, herbacous plants, annuals, bulbs and grasses.
Today most of the new varieties of plants that constantly keep appearing in the garden centres are derived form cross pollinating different plants in seculsion. This is done by clever plant breeders that hand pollinate one flower with another flower of the same species or even the same genus. They then note the parent plants and protect the pollinated plant so it can’t be subsequently pollinated by insects. They then harvest the seeds to grow on to see what new colours of flower or hybrids may have occurred.
So for example if a breeder is looking to produce a white daffodil he pollinates the palest yellow flowers with the other palest yellow flowers hoping to produce and even paler yellow or even white flower. This might be repeated over a number of years before he finally comes up trumps with a pure white flower. After this the plant will be grown on vegetatively to ensure that it stays true to the parent plant. Sometimes seedlings worthy of growing on just turn up by chance and this can happen in your own garden as well as in a nursery.
I have had white foxgloves in my garden for 15 years and they have self sown every year but I have never had any other colour other than white. The reason for this is that there are no other foxgloves in insect flying distance to cross pollinate them so they have come true to the parent plant and stayed white. This can never be guaranteed though and usually their is a variation ,even if slight, between the parent plant and seedling although species tend to come relatively true compared to named varieties. This may prove to be a positive for our ash trees that are struggling with the fungal dieback disease at present as there is a hope that the species is so diverse some trees will be naturally immune to infection.
You can have great fun in your own garden experimenting with seed collecting, sowing and growing