PUSHING THE BORDERS

Hardly 'pushing the borders' but I can't resist the charm of Dahlias. They are so easy to grow and provide a huge range of colours as well as satisfying the local bee popultaion. I grow a couple of named varites, 'David Howard' and 'Fascination' but generally like to grow from seed.
Last year a sowed a packet of 'Bishops Children' then selected the best colours and saved the tubers for this year as well as collecting seed from them.
This year I potted up the tubers and planted out, sowed the seed and planted some of them out as well. Usually 'Bishops children' produce single flowers in a range of colours but one of the 'Bishops Grandchildren', has produced this double IMG_5090 by Andy Cowlishaw, on Flickr
I like it so much I've made Falmouth a Bishopric. :)

It is a good seed strain to select from.

Some years ago there was a rather pushy vicar at Camborne, who was known [behind his back] as the Bishop of Camborne.

In his honor I will enthrone the following as The Bishop of Camborne.



A single but very red, and with good dark foliage.

Not standing up very well to the ongoing gales.

Chad

Chad wrote:It is a good seed strain to select from.

Some years ago there was a rather pushy vicar at Camborne, who was known [behind his back] as the Bishop of Camborne.

In his honor I will enthrone the following as The Bishop of Camborne.



A single but very red, and with good dark foliage.

Not standing up very well to the ongoing gales.

Chad

Seems a very good naming, I do love a back story :)

Chad wrote:

A single but very red, and with good dark foliage.

Nice one.

What causes this to happen?
IMG_5091 by Andy Cowlishaw, on Flickr
The white flower is on the same plant as the red flower to the right.

Look at the variety Twyning's Smartie for the most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon.

It is thought to be 'an unstable gene'; that is, there is a switch [epigenetic rather than protein coding DNA] in the DNA that isn't firmly pushed to 'on ' or 'off' but can flip between. Depending on when in the floral development it switches you either get bits of petals, whole petals, whole flowers or whole branches of one colour.

Chad

This one turned out to be a whole branch, a second white flower has opened on it.

The third flower has the edge over the first two, wish I could 'fix' it
20200917_152914 by Andy Cowlishaw, on Flickr

Nice bloom.

Because it is 'unstable' you can't get a whole plant to stay that way reliably, but it is worth taking some of that stem as a cutting even this late in the year.

If you are lucky, a significant portion of the new plant will behave like that next year.

If you are really lucky they can sometimes be 'fixed' by repeatedly propagating from 'the best bit' each year.

More often you get the same mix of forms wherever you take the cuttings from.

But worth a go!

Chad