Monday 21 March 2011

Echeveria hybrids first flowers

Having spent a few days on the beautiful Dorset coast coast I was going to post about that.  Then I got home to find that my echeveria hybrid is flowering.  I posted about the hybrid before and how pleased I was about its development. So waiting for its first proper flowering season is the last piece of the puzzle and as the Dorset coast will still be there for a few days longer (hopefully) I thought I would show the flowers first.

Echeveria flowers take different forms,  this type would fit in the shepherd's crook style due to the distinctive shape. They match their mother in that respect and are the same as echeveria pulidonis.  The yellow colour is similar as well, although given that echeveria rosea also has yellow flowers that is no surprise.

There are quite a few flower stalks which is always good and the flowers themselves are bigger than for plain pulidonis. It would have been nice if they were a little more different,  but I can't complain that much. They are flowering earlier than Pulidonis although that could just be this year,  it will take a couple of years to confirm their exact flowering period.

At this point I should really be pollinating the flowers with others from the same batch of hybrids.  Then growing the seeds and repeating two or three times.  Then the seeds should hopefully be stable and come true if grown else where. This is how you ensure that seeds produce a standard set of plants and is why producing new hybrids is such a slow process.  This year though I am going to have to wait and all propagation is going to have to be through offsets.  I have taken 6 pups off already and these will be grown to give me a good collection of plants. Maybe next year I'll start mass production.

As for the name, you may be wondering what I decided to call it.  In the end the voting went for echeveria adonis blue. Who knows one day it may appear in a garden center near you.

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