The Rorists^ Review 



March 20, 1913. 



PETEB OLSEM'S PET. 



In Carnation The Herald Peter Olsem 

 has carried forward the work begun by 

 the late James Hartshorne. He began 

 where Mr. Hartshorne left off. The 

 Herald is the result of a cross between 

 two of Mr. Hartshorne 's unnamed 

 seedlings, one of them having also been 

 one of the seed parents of Harlowarden. 

 The illustration on page 11 shows 

 the house of The Herald grown this 

 year by Mr. Olsem at the establish- 

 ment of the Chicago Carnation Co., 

 Joliet, 111. The house contains 6,000 

 plants, from March struck cuttings 

 benched in the first part of August. 

 The house was in good crop October 1 

 and it was on the bench shown that the 

 blooms were taken that won first pre- 

 mium in the classes for red at the St. 

 Paul and Cleveland flower shows in 

 November. The photograph was taken 

 in January, when 15,000 cuttings had 

 already been taken from the plants. To 

 date 75,000 cuttings have been rooted 

 and shipped, going into every state in 

 the Union, which insures The Herald 

 receiving a thorough trial next season. 

 Orders on hand assure a sale exceed- 

 ing 100,000 before the season is over. 

 Both Mr. Olsem and Mr. Pyfer are well 

 pleased with the way the trade has 

 taken to The Herald and they say that 

 the behavior of the variety in their 

 house this season leads them to believe 

 that it will have an even larger sale 

 next year. 



CARNATION BSEEDING. 



[A paper by William Stuart, •t the U. S. 

 Department of Ag^rlculture, read at a recent 

 meeting of the Florists' Club of Washington, at 

 Washington, D. C] 



When I was invited by the chairman 

 of your program committee to give you 

 an address on some phase of carnation 

 breeding, my first impulse was to plead 

 a lack of ability, as well as of time to 

 accept such an undertaking. The per- 

 sistence and winning persuasive powers 

 of your chairman, however, were of 

 such a nature that I could not well do 

 otherwise than accept his invitation, 

 but with this understanding, that I 

 would not be expected to occupy much 

 of your valuable time. 



It may not be inappropriate at the 

 outset to say that my first interest in 

 the carnation dates back nearly a quar- 

 ter of a century, when as a young man 

 I began a three-year greenhouse ap- 

 prenticeship. This was prior to the 

 day of the long-stemmed carnation, 

 when such varieties as Boule d» Neige 

 and Alegatiere were in their zenith. 

 Carnation breeding was little practiced 



in those days. The writer first became 

 directly interested in plant breeding 

 some nine years ago, when, as horti- 

 culturist at the Vermont Station, car- 

 nation breeding was indulged in partly 

 as a diversion and partly to study some 

 problems connected with the work of 

 breeding. The results of some of these 

 studies were presented in the twentieth 

 annual report of the Vermont Agricul- 

 tural Experiment Station in 1908, pages 

 355 to 358, under the caption of "Sea- 

 sonal Influence in Carnation Crossing 

 Relative to Seed Production." The con- 

 clusions arrived at from this investiga- 

 tion were that the early crosses — that 

 is, those made in October and Novem- 

 ber — seemed to give a considerably 

 higher percentage of successes, a much 

 larger number of seeds per capsule; a 

 higher percentage of germination and 

 apparently heavier seed. The prob- 

 able reason for better results from the 

 early crosses was assumed to be the 

 greater vigor of the plants rather than 

 seasonal influence. 



Norton's Theory. 



In the winter of 1907-08, investiga- 

 tions were undertaken looking toward 

 the corroboration or disproval of Nor- 

 ton's theory, expressed in December, 

 1904, with respect to the possibility 

 of our commercial carnation being an 

 unfixed hybrid between a single and a 

 true double. Carnation seedlings were 

 I classed into three groups, singles, semi- 

 doubles and doubles. The semi-double 

 represented the commercial florists' 

 type, and the double, what is known as 

 the bullhead. 



These investigations were pursued at 

 the Vermont Station during the winters 

 of 1907-08 and 1908-09, and in the 

 greenhouses at the United States De- 

 partment of Agriculture, at Arlington 

 Farm, in 1910-11. The results of this 

 inquiry are now embodied in a report 

 soon to be issued in bulletin form by 

 the Vermont Experiment Station. 



The crosses which were made may be 

 clai^sed under five groups: 



1. Single X single. 



2. Single x double. 

 .S. Commercial x single. 



4. Commercial x commercial. 



5. Double X double. 

 In the first group twenty-two crosses 



netted 354 flowering plants, of which 

 all were single. 



In group 2, single x double, forty- 

 four crosses gave 1,004 flowering plants, 

 of which four were single, 988 com- 

 mercial and twelve double; percentages, 

 respectively, of .4, 98.4 and 1.2. 



Six crosses in group 3, commercial x 



single, resulted in forty-one flowering 

 plants, of which twenty-one were single 

 and twenty commercial; percentages, re- 

 spectively, of 51.2 and 48.8. 



Twenty-four crosses in group 4, com- 

 mercial X commercial, netted 260 flow- 

 ering plants, of which sixty-two were 

 single and 198 semi-double and double; 

 percentages, respectively, of 23.8 and 

 76.2. 



In group 5 all efforts to cross double 

 with double were unsuccessful. This is 

 in direct corroboration of similar efforts 

 by Norton. It does not necessarily 

 prove, however, that such crosses can- 

 not be effected. 



In order that we may fully under- 

 stand the significance of the above re- 

 sults, it seems desirable to enter into a 

 brief discussion of the principles of 

 heredity as exemplified in Mendel's 

 law of inheritance. 



Mendel's Law of Inheritance. 



While you are all more or less famil- 

 iar with the Mendelian theory of in- 

 heritance, it may not be amiss to pre- 

 sent at this time a brief interpreta- 

 tion of it, in order that we may better 

 understand the discussion which is to 

 follow. In 1900 Hugo de Vries redis- 

 covered an old paper by Gregor Men- 

 del, which had been presented before a 

 scientific society in Brunn, Austria, in 

 February and March, 1865. This paper 

 contained a detailed account of care- 

 fully conducted investigations with the 

 garden pea, in which the inheritance of 

 certain definite characters was noted. 

 Only such varieties of the garden pea 

 were selected for the work as had been 

 proven by several seasons' culture to 

 reproduce themselves absolutely true 

 from seed. Another desideratum in 

 their choice was that they possess op- 

 posing pairs of unit characters, 



Mendel studied seven pairs of these 

 opposing characters, one of which will 

 be sufficient to illustrate the method he 

 pursued. This pair of characters were 

 round and wrinkled seed. These, being 

 well defined characters, were easy to 

 study and to interpret in the resulting 

 progeny. It was found that the hy- 

 brids of this cross, or the Fi genera- 

 tion, gave all round seeds and this 

 character was therefore called the dom- 

 inant one. In the F2 generation, from 

 self-fertilized plants, he found that 

 there was a splitting up of these char- 

 acters in a fairly uniform and definite 

 ratio. On an average this ratio ap- 

 proximated seventy-five per cent round 

 and twenty-five per cent wrinkled. The 

 wrinkled pea was then said to be re- 

 cessive to the round. In the subse- 



