SOME STUDIES IN BLOSSOM COLOK INHERI- 

 TANCE IN TOBACCO, WITH SPECIAL EEFER- 

 ENCE TO N. SYLVESTRIS AND N. TABACUM 

 H. A. ALLARD 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture 



The blossoms of varieties of Nicotiana tahacum exhibit 

 three distinct colors, white, carmine and pink.^ 



In the writer's crossing experiments, two white-flow- 

 ered nicotianas were used, N. sylvestris, a species with 

 long, slender, pure white blossoms, and a variety of A". 

 tahacum from Honduras (S. P. I. No. 30887), with rather 

 small, pure white blossoms of the tahacum type. The 

 pink-flowered variety generally used was the Connecticut 

 Broadleaf variety, although the varieties 70-leaf Cuban, 

 a mammoth type of Cuban which appeared as a mutation 

 in Connecticut in 1912, and Maryland Mammoth also were 

 used. The carmine-blossomed tobacco^ is a variety of 

 tahacum sold by various seedsmen for ornamental pur- 

 poses under the name giant red-flowering tobacco. This 

 variety breeds true to blossom color and crosses readily 

 with all the commercial varieties of tahacum. 



Crosses of Pink-flowered Varieties with Carmine- 

 flowered Varieties 

 In the crosses Pink $ X Carmine and their recip- 

 rocals. Carmine, without exception, has been perfectly 



1 The colors carmine and pink have been eompared with Eidgway's Color 



almost exactly his Hellebore Red, shown on Plate 3S. 



2 There seems to be little definite information at 

 origin of the carmine-flowered varieties of N. tahactir 

 monograph ' ' Delle Razze Dei Tabacchi, ' ' Atti. Bel R 'Tn> 

 di Napoli, Serie 6, 1905, pp. 77-306, speaks of the Nej 

 of N. tabacum, as having intensely red blossoms. The 

 said to have distinctly red blossoms. 



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