Wanted Hippeastrum seed double white or coloured

11 years ago

Hi everyone,

I am another Amaryllis nut :) and I'm desperately trying to find some double white (preferably) seeds to grow. I've been looking all over the net without success, and was hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction. I am willing to pay a small amount, I am not flash with money as a pensioner but I'm a very keen gardener and like a lot of you I not only grow for the love of it but also to allow some rare plants a place to live, before they're all gone. We have 30 acres and little by little we are transforming it from cow paddock to mixed food and useful plant forest. So if someone out there has some seeds they can live without - I'll give them a good home here in Australia.

thanks for reading

Heddysue

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Comments (3)

dondeldux z6b South Shore Massachusetts
11 years ago
Hi Heddysue,

Doubles lack the proper reproductive parts to set seeds so one has to put the double pollen on a single and hope to get a small percentage of doubles from the cross.

It might just be easier for you to do your own hybridizing using double pollen of your choice on singles of your choice.
If you are looking for a particular color double pollen maybe someone could send

you some pollen so you can do your own crosses. Unfortunately, over here are season are reversed from yours so you'd most likely be better off acquiring pollen in Australia..after all, you've got Maguires and they have some luscious doubles....

Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

Donna

This post was edited by dondeldux on Wed, Dec 5, 12 at 6:15
heddysue
Original Author
11 years ago
Hi
I keep getting conflicting information and can't seem to get to the bottom of it. Posted below a snipped segment from
http://www.bulbsociety.org/ABOUT_IBS/Publications/HERBERTIA/vol52/HybridizingHippeastrums.html all I want is some seeds that will throw up a few white doubles is that so hard?
Yes I've looked at Mcguires and they don't have a pure white double that I can see. And certainly not for sale at the moment, but thanks for the suggestion Donna it was a good one.

snipped...
I'm one person who likes double hippeastrums. A lot. So was the late Ivan Kenney. Ivan hybridized for doubles and produced some beauties, none of which, to my knowledge, he introduced. For many years we were privileged to see some of Ivan's creations at our annual amaryllis shows sponsored by the Southern California Hemerocallis and Amaryllis Society. He often took blue ribbons and even higher prizes for his double hybrids.

Ivan told me that there are some tricks to producing double hippeastrums. He said that, as a rule of thumb, if you cross two doubles, you might get up to 50% of the resultant seedlings producing some doubling in the progeny's flowers. Even so, very double flowers are not all that common among the seedlings.

On the other hand, if you cross a double with a single the doubling falls off sharply and you would be lucky to get up to 25% of the progeny's flowers showing some doubling. Very double flowers are even less common among the seedlings of these crosses than when two doubles are crossed. If you are interested in hybridizing for double hippeastrums you might bear these figures in mind.
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kaboehm (zone 9a, TX USA)
11 years ago
Heddysue,

I don't know how easy it is to cross 2 doubles when only some have pollen and stigmas are rare! Maybe because he had thousands it was easier for him to find that rare one,

Thanks for the hints. It still seems like mission impossible for us. It's a shame you are stuck looking for seeds as Blooming Bulbs offers Alfresco for just a couple US dollars each very early in the season.

Kristi