The Making of the Red Sunflower — By wilmatte p. Cockerell, 



Colo- 

 rado 



AN ACTUAL RECITAL OF THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF A RED COLOR IN THE SUN- 

 FLOWER, AND HOW IT WAS FIXED AND BROUGHT INTO PRACTICAL USE 



(Editors' Note: — This is a personal account of an actual achievement in plant breeding by an amateur gardener, and is an excellent illustration of a field ofvas^ 

 possibilites that lie open to all. But very little has yet been done in actual plant breeding in American gardens; yet it is afield of endeavor that should prove most 

 attractive. Gregor Mendel's work illustrates forcibly the value of exact methods a>id careful records. He probably did not realize at all what he was doing when he ex- 

 perimented with his garden peas. Yet he discovered a set of laws that we, a generation later, are using to great practical advantage. Breeding is now almost an exact 

 science, thanks to the work of the obscure monk in his little monastery garden. 



THE "Insects' Homer" begins 

 one of his inimitable essays by 

 inquiring "Do you know the 

 Halicti? Even if you do not 

 know the Halicti you may still enjoy some 

 of the minor satisfactions of life." I should 

 inquire if you had ever tried making plant 

 hybrids, and if you had not I should insist 

 that you had missed one of the great 

 satisfactions of life, one of the most inter- 

 esting reasons for associating with plants. 



We had been long interested in breeding 

 experiments, the Master of the Garden and 

 I. We had visited Bateson's gardens at 

 Cambridge, England, seen Standfuss's won- 

 derful moth hybrids at Zurich, Switzerland, 

 studied Morgan's curious little flies, and 

 listened to Davenport's explanations of 

 his wonderful experiments at Cold Spring 

 Harbor, and all this work seemed to show 

 that a new era was beginning for the prac- 

 tical breeder. It seemed to us that it 

 would be difficult to overestimate the im- 

 portance of the results to be obtained during 

 the next fifty years, and we often sighed 

 for some little thing that we might have 

 of our own, in our own back garden. We 

 were agreed in wishing to work with plants, 

 but we had no thought that we should have 

 the great good fortune to perfect a plant 

 that would be grown in many gardens 

 in distant parts of the world. Our 

 experience is not unique, but it is rare 

 enough to seem worth the telling. 



But to the story: Having occasion 

 to cross the road near our house one 

 warm August morning I saw what I 

 took to be a large red butterfly on the 

 head of a sunflower growing by the 

 roadside. Glancing at the plant a 

 little later, I was surprised to see that 

 the butterfly had not moved, and when 

 I approached nearer I saw to my 

 astonishment that there was no butter- 

 fly but a sunflower with rays deeply 

 suffused with a satiny, chestnut-red. 

 There was only one plant with red 

 blossoms, and this close to the road 

 where hundreds of people passed daily, 

 and already one of the heads had been 

 carried away as a curiosity. That 

 evening I took the Master of the Gar- 

 den to see my find. 



We were agreed that we could not 

 leave the plant where it was; it would 

 almost surely be destroyed. We had 

 no experience in transplanting full 

 grown plants, so we studied the root 

 system of a common sunflower, care- 

 fully lifted our red treasure, planted it in 

 the garden, shaded it for a day or two, 

 and it seemed hardly to feel the shock, 

 but went on blooming normally. 



(See colored illustration on this month's cover) 



The next thing was to find out just what 

 work had been done in crossing sunflowers, 

 and we found on looking up the literature, 

 that sunflowers are self sterile. Here was 

 a dilemma; there was, so far as we knew, 

 and we had seen millions of sunflowers, 

 only one plant of the red sunflower in the 

 world, and this alas, could not be self ferti- 

 lized ! 



The only thing to do was to make crosses 

 with the ordinary sunflowers and see what 

 would come of it. And here was the 

 supreme interest, for we could to some 

 extent, predict the result of these crosses 

 since we had a key to the age-long riddle 

 of heredity. The man who furnished this 

 key was Johann Gregor Mendel, an 

 Augustinian monk, Abbot of the old 

 Monastery of Brunn, who by a careful 

 study of garden peas through eight years, 

 discovered laws and ratios which seem 

 little short of magic. He had discovered 

 a nature-secret of untold value not alone 

 to plant breeders but to the human species 

 in its upward evolution. But he was ahead 

 of his time, and Darwin, the one man in 

 the world who would have seen the import- 

 ance of this work, never heard of the 

 experiments of the nature-studying monk 

 at Brunn and so this wonderful thesis lay 



The result of crossing Helianthns cucumerifolius and H. cuticularis 

 (red). The base of each ray is splashed red 



332 



forgotten for more than thirty years. In 

 1 900 three European workers almost simul- 

 taneously discovered Mendel's paper and 

 to-day "Mendelism" is talked of every- 

 where. 



Now to return to the sunflower. The 

 first thing we were anxious to know was 

 whether the red would be dominant or 

 recessive; that is, would it show in the 

 plants coming from our crosses or would it 

 be hidden or covered by the yellow. Dur- 

 ing the following summer we went East, 

 but before we left, we noted that some of 

 the young plants showed a great deal of 

 purple in the stems. On our return early 

 in August, a gorgeous sight met our eyes, 

 for the sunflowers were in full bloom, and 

 about half were splendidly red. How 

 could we reconcile this with Mendel's law? 

 All were crossed with red and if red were 

 dominant then all should be red; if it 

 were recessive, all should be yellow. 



The explanation is that the original plant 

 was a half-red, though it may have had 

 no red parent. In many similar cases 

 plants and animals have been understood 

 only after being used in breeding experi- 

 ments. The Herr Professor wrote it all 

 down in terms of Mendelism, and the 

 diligent should read therein of pure types, 

 of gametes, of zygotes, of the possi- 

 bility of having heterozygous and 

 homozygous forms. All of which can 

 be understood by the wise and guessed 

 at by others. 



But the practical working of Mendel- 

 ism is the theme of this paper so we 

 return to the garden. All the red 

 sunflowers in 191 1, then, were half-reds 

 just like the plant found by the road- 

 side in 1910, but there was this great 

 advantage: we now had a number of 

 plants, and could cross reds with reds. 

 The result was quite as expected, and 

 it was a great day in the garden when 

 the small, dark blossom appeared. 

 The published chart of the year before 

 was now shown in triumph. There was 

 the expected proportion of one yellow 

 to three reds, though most of the in- 

 tensely red types were bi-colored with 

 the ends of the rays yellow. This was 

 due to the fact that the wild plant 

 carries a factor for marking as well as 

 for color. 



Of course, a new plant with sur- 

 prising and interesting characters is 

 not often found, but it is certainly 

 true that many more good variations 

 would be discovered if people were 

 everywhere on the lookout for them. 

 Aside, however, from the discovery of 

 new things, there is an almost un- 



