24 



ESTABLISHMENT OF VARIETIES IN COLEUS 



Plants with color pattern green-yellow spotted-red blotched and with 

 uniformly entire leaves. The plants grouped in this class (figs. 4 and 

 23) present perhaps greater diversity than those of any other type, 

 embracing (1) plants with considerable yellow in scattered areas in all 

 leaves, (2) plants with only slight amounts of yellow in scattered areas 

 in nearly all leaves, and (3) plants with only a few leaves possessing yel- 

 low spots. Between the extremes there was every degree of variation 

 and often all degrees would be seen at one time among the leaves of a 

 single plant. 



It is difficult in such plants to determine what constitutes a variation 

 either as a fluctuating or a bud variation when it involves green and 

 yellow. The cases given in table 3 are those in which an entire branch 

 or a sector of a branch showed leaves that were uniform for a new 

 pattern. Plants having irregular mixtures of leaves of equally different 

 patterns were common. Such cases are of special interest, as are the 



TABLE 3. Plants with entire leaves and pattern green-yellow spotted-red blotched (fig. 4)- 



1 Pattern derived by fluctuating variation. 



fluctuating variations in a seed progeny. They possess many simi- 

 larities to cases of size inheritance described by Goodspeed (1912) and 

 raise the question as to whether color heredity is not also quantitatively 

 rather than qualitatively inherited. 



As has already been noted, the parent plant (No. 1) had one branch 

 (No. 14) with leaves green-yellow spotted-red blotched. All the 89 plants 

 of clone 14 descended from this branch through 6 generations of selec- 

 tion. The plants of this pattern here given with clones 11, 12, and 3 

 were obtained from cases of bud variation from the type green-yellow- 

 red blotched (see table 2). The 79 plants of clone 13, however, were 

 derived from 5 plants that gave a fluctuating change from green-red 

 blotched to green-yellow spotted-red blotched. This was a frequent 

 fluctuation from the green plants especially of clone 13, as shown in 

 table 5, and the yellow-spotted condition thus obtained was tested in 

 four generations, comprising a total of 79 plants. 



