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Sunday, June 25, 2017

Moraea MM 13-125

Seed parent: Moraea 10-39a (M. aristata X villosa)

Pollen parent: Moraea bellendenii  














I was hoping to get a flower with yellow tepals and the vivid blue eye of the seed parent. No luck so far, but the resulting flowers are still very interesting. They bloom quite late in the season (which comes from M. bellendenii), and have some interesting characteristics.

MM 13-125a. This one's a bit more orange than its siblings. How I get orange from crossing white and yellow flowers is unclear, but I've seen weird relationships between orange and yellow in many hybrids, so it's no longer a big surprise.

MM 13-125b. Notable for a couple of reasons. First, it's very floriferous. The stem was fairly tall, had several buds on it, and some of the flowers in one head opened at the same time (in most species they usually open one at a time). M. bellendenii seems to give these characteristics to many of its offspring. The other really striking thing about this plant is the weird pattern in the eye: There is a black inner ring, then an orange chevron, then a broad blackish outer ring.


Something similar happened in a couple of M. lurida hybrids this year (MM 13-195 and MM 13-197). I don't know what physically is happening with these flowers. Has the tissue that normally forms the eye turned orange, or is the actual eye the blackish area, and the orange area is a bit of the cup color leaking out into the tepal? (In these photos, the darker flower is a couple of days younger than the light one. Like most Moraeas, they fade a bit as they age.)

MM 13-125c. Resembles form B, but the eye is filled in.

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