Plants from Seeds-Hybridizing

If your aim is a whole greenhouse full of Saintpaulias in a hurry, purchase seed from one of the specialty houses. These will give you plants with many leaf forms and various flower colors, but if you want more of a certain variety, the only sure way to reproduce it is through leaves or cuttings (called vegetative propagation). If you think the variety might be improved upon as to leaf form, blossom color, or growth habit, use it as one of the parents for your first plant-breeding venture. Select as the other parent a plant having the desirable characteristics you seek.

To hybridize, use your fingernail or a small pair of scissors to cut through the yellow pollen sacs in the center of the flower of one parent. Hold a piece of white paper under the sacs to catch the pollen. Later, as you become adept, you can crack the sacs between thumb and forefinger, let the pollen fall on your finger tips, and then brush it over the tip of the stigma of a blossom on the other plant, the one which is to become the seed parent. Keep a record of your cross on a small white sales tag (available at stationery stores). String the tag over the pollinated flower; tie or loop it to make it stay until the seed pod is ripe.

A few varieties self-pollinate, their pollen sacs cracking open and the pistil pushing through the pollen for self-pollination. To preclude this, clip the anthers from the plant you intend to use as seed parent immediately after the blossom opens. If pollination has been successful, the flower will drop off, although petals on double flowers may remain for days or weeks after pollination.

Seed capsules (pods) take from 4 to 9 months to ripen, depending on the species or variety. When the pod becomes soft and brown, it is time to clip it from the plant and store it in a dry place. It is best to shell the small seeds from the pod as soon as it is dry. Large seed companies do not hold stock over one year, for with each year the vitality of the seed decreases. I have, however, had up to 35 per cent germination on 3-year old seeds, 70 to 80 per cent on year-old ones. As you shell out these tiny dustlike seeds you will realize why they are so valuable : it takes hundreds of thousands of them to make a quarter-ounce.

Some seed capsules will be short and fat, others long and thin. The amount of seed within also varies greatly: some African violet varieties will have only fifty to one hundred seeds while others contain as many as five hundred. Sow the seeds on vermiculite, milled sphagnum, or sand; do not press into the soil. Label them, showing parentage and date. Put a pane of glass over the planting and set it in 70-degree temperature. The germination period is 10 days to 3 weeks. When the seedlings have four good leaves, prick them out and set in flats of soil or synthetic mixture, spaced about 2 inches apart. As plants grow and the leaves touch, shift to individual 2-inch pots, with a later shift to 3- or 4-inchers. Plants bloom in about 6 months from seed.

It’s quite possible that none of the plants in this first filial generation (F1) will be just what you had in mind in making the cross; but a back cross among the seedlings or to one of the parent plants may bring you, in the second filial generation (F2), just the hybrid you are looking for (or something else just as good). The pink and white colors are recessive and if a cross has been made between a pink or white and a dominant color such as purple or blue, the pink or white may not show itself in the first generation.

You may have many lovely seedlings among your first hybrids but none you deem good enough to name. In that case you can sell them to dime stores and plant counters for retailing under the label “hybrid.” Developing a yellow or red African violet is undoubtedly the ambition of many hybridizers. Some authorities have maintained that it may be possible to obtain crosses between Saint-paulia and certain red or yellow flowered fellow-members of the Gesneriacae. But it is significant that to date none has been registered.

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