Like tiny pieces of bright blue sky dropped into your garden, forget-me-nots are one of the few true-blue flowers available to gardeners.These plants are steeped in history and symbolism, and are eas
06.06.2023 - 17:09 / gardenerspath.com / Sylvia Dekker
How to Pollinate and Collect Hybrid Snapdragon SeedsIf you’re here reading this article, this is a good indication that you want to do some experimenting. Like an artist mixing colors on a palette.
Sure, you could just let your snapdragon bed do its thing, collect the seeds, and see what color combinations you get next year. But you’ll likely end up with a similar mix of shades.
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If you want to work with beautiful snapdragon blooms, you’ll find out why these plants are a great choice to try to create hybrids with in this guide.
We’ll teach you how to cross-pollinate and collect the resulting seeds.
Here’s everything we’ll talk about:
Snapdragon GeneticsSnapdragons (Antirrhinum majus) are an excellent choice for hybridization experiments.
In fact, before Arabidopsisbecame what one of my professors used to call “the white mouse of the plant world” when it came to scientific studies, snapdragons were the plant of choice.
They are easy to manipulate, and have been very well studied. If you think back to middle school, you might remember genetics problem sets using snapdragon breeding and color as the subject.
While most wild types are self-incompatible, meaning the flowers can’t pollinate themselves, domesticated snapdragons are self-compatible. Plus, they are receptive to all pollen from other wild species so they are very easy to hybridize.
However, it does take some intervention on the part of the gardener. Otherwise, the results will be randomized with the majority pollinating themselves and a few bumblebees doing some criss-crossing of pollen as well.
If you are planning to collect seeds and want them to be true to
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