fun with hybrids

There are over a quarter million plant species known to biology. Of those more than 5,000 can be found in California, and 1,500 in San Diego County alone. With so many amazing plant species out there I still find myself being interesting in hybrids between the pure species.

My last post was on Sarracenia, the North American pitcher plants. The genus appears to be fairly new to the world in evolutionary terms, and all the species in the genus will hybridize easily with any of the others. And all these hybrids will continue to interbreed with the parent species or other hybrids. When you find a bog with two or more species in it, chances are good that you’ll find intermediate plants with traits of all the species present in that location.

This drives biologists crazy. Finding a plant that’s a pure species can be a major headache when the plants are out there, frolicking in the mud. But evolutionary biology acknowledges that hybrids can introduce new genes into a plant’s gene pool so that they might be better equipped to withstand some stressors that a pure species might not.

Sarracenia Judith Hindle

In addition to possible evolutionary advantages, a hybrid plant found in nature can be a really cool-looking mongrel. And human-created hybrids that have been selected for specific traits over generations can begin to take a species or genus in directions nature would never have imagined.

Here on the left is the Sarracenia hybrid Judith Hindle. I first encountered mass tissue-cultured numbers of it in the flower aisle at Trader Joe’s a couple years ago. It’s a pretty great-looking plant by itself, but imagine a whole store display of it. This human created selection derives from three species, and its pedigree can be notated: ((Sarracenia purpurea x S. flava) x S. leucophylla) x ((S. purpurea x S. flava) x S. leucophylla).

Sarracenia purpurea var burkii syn rosea

Doing the math, you an see that it’s one-fourth S. purpurea, this species. (My photo here isn’t the exact parent, just one general example of what this variable species can look like. Several taxonomists have decided that this plant I’ve shown you, S. purpurea var. burkii, is actually a new species, S. rosea, but it looks quite similar and you can get the general idea…)

Sarracenia flava coppertop

Another quarter of the ancestry comes from S. flava. (You might recognize this same photo from my last post. Once again this is just a rough estimation of what the parent looked like. It’s actual great-grandparents were S. flava var. rugelli, a plant with pure green pitchers with a red patch in the throat.)

sarracenia-leucophylla-tarnok

And the final two quarters of its ancestry comes from the gorgeous S. leucophylla, the white-topped pitcher plant. I find myself comparing the hybrid with the parents, trying to see the characteristics that came through in the final hybrid. Clearly S. leucophylla has the most influence in this cross.

Sarracenia Dixie Lace

Here’s another common sarracenia, S. Dixie Lace. Larry Mellichamp, its breeder, isn’t 100% certain of its parentage, but he estimates it to be: (S. leucophylla x S. rubra) x (S. psittacina x S. purpurea). It shares two parents with Judith Hindle above, but introduces two new species into the mix.

Sarracenia rubra gulfensis ancestral form

The presence of this ancestor, S. rubra, is subtle, and is probably most manifested in the somewhat upright-growing pitchers and the robust growth habit. (Once again, the plant I’ve shown is only a close approximation of the S. rubra var. wherryi that was used for the actual cross. And yet again, this latter species has been classified as a separate species by some taxonomists.)

Sarracenia psittacina giant form

The final ancestor is S. psittacina, a plant that’s practically impossible to hide the presence of in any hybrid. The leaning growth habit and patterning of the pitchers takes several generations to fade into the background.

Salvia sagittata leaves

Hybrids can happen anywhere. In the irrigated part of my garden I have a few sage species from Europe and the Americas. These are the leaves of Salvia sagittata, the arrow-leaved sage, a plant from Ecuador.

Hybrid Salvia Seedling

Next to it I noticed a young plant which at first I thought was a seedling of the of its neighbor. It has the same light green coloration and coarse leaf texture as does S. sagittata. When I started looking closer at the leaves, however, something seemed a little off. Instead of the distinct arrow shape, the leaves are closer to oval. Seedlings sometimes take a while to develop their mature characteristics, but I started thinking that it might be a hybrid of S. sagittata with one of the other sages nearby.

Salvia nemerosa Snow Hills leaves

Three feet away is S. nemorosa. It also has coarse-textured leaves, but they’re smaller, darker green and rounder (probably “linear” to “oblong” with a “cordate” leaf base, according to the leaf morphology charts).

Salvia Hot Lips leaves

And about six feet away are several plants of the popular ‘Hot Lips’ cultivar of S. microphylla, a species from Texas into Mexico. Its leaves are smooth, much smaller, darker green and also more rounded. (I guess I’d call it an “ovate” leaf form with an “obtuse” leaf tip.)

Who do you think might be the father? I’m leaning towards S. nemorosa.

The seedling sage found a clearing in the middle of a little walkway to germinate. I’ll let the seedling bloom to see if it’s interesting–or if it’s even a hybrid at all. Seeing the flowers should help me better guess what its parents might be. If it’s worth keeping I’ll transplant it out of harm’s way. If it’s not, I’ll treat it as any other unwanted garden colonizer. Whatever the case, it’ll be an interesting little experiment.

Topic for a future post: What’s bad about hybrids?

4 thoughts on “fun with hybrids”

  1. I’m a lot less sanguine about all this, for my own case. I’d rather like to restore the native landscape and undo all the errors of my ways and those who came before me, to preserve what is unique about this spot of mother earth. It’s a hard row to hoe though…

    1. CM, a tall order, and an admirable goal. I’m arrogant enough to include myself in what’s unique about my plot of earth and what happens in my garden, and my ground is tainted with the cultural baggage I bring to garden-making, even to the point that garden-making might even include plant-making via hybridization. It’s definitely a different thing to arrange three plants in a row than it is to breed them together to see what might come about. But I think there are responsible ways to feed a curiosity that might explore in the backyard over a decade what nature itself might do over the course of the centuries. In these cases, with the plants I mentioned, they stand no chance of surviving locally outside of human pampering, let alone escaping to the wild lands beyond the garden walls.

  2. Those pitcher plants are very cool. Seems like you’re on your way to having Sarracenia and Salvia cultivars named “Lost in the Landscape.”

    1. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the sage hybrid. Salvia x ‘Lost Landscape’? Hmmm, never thought of the possibility. Maybe it’d need a different name to stand a chance on the market, though. Something about sweet foods or cute puppies or kittens, maybe…

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