THE EVOLUTION OF NEW FORMS IN VIOLA 

 THROUGH HYBRIDISM 1 



PROFESSOR EZRA BRAINERD 



MlDDLEBURY, VERMONT 



During the past eight years I have given much time to 

 the study of our North American violets, not only as rep- 

 resented in large herbaria, but especially as seen in living- 

 specimens, both in their natural surroundings and under 

 culture. My garden now contains over 3,500 violet plants 

 of about 650 different numbers or sorts, some 200 of which 

 are from the wild, and 450 raised from seed. 



The genus has for over a century been known as diffi- 

 cult and perplexing because of its polymorphism. It has 

 been my good fortune to discover that this is largely due 

 to the frequent occurrence of hybrids between species of 

 the same group. I make out to date some 66 different 

 hybrids that have arisen spontaneously. From about 50 

 of these I have raised offspring that segregate, often in a 

 surprising manner, reverting variously to the characters 

 of the putative parents of the hybrid. In many cases I 

 have raised from the hybrid two, or even three, genera- 

 tions of offspring. 



But not all the anomalous violets that I have grown and 

 propagated can be called hybrids. Hybrids in Viola may 

 be known by two marks : first, they are either completely 

 sterile or markedly infertile; secondly, their seedlings are 

 strikingly unlike each other, and often unlike the mother 

 plant. The other class of anomalous violets are normally 

 fertile, and come true to seed ; they are often of sporadic 

 occurrence, or if appearing in two or three stations, the 

 stations may be hundreds of miles apart; furthermore, 



