Anne Seymour, age 12, of Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, for her question:
How do they domesticate wild flowers?
You might classify a flowery garden as an expensive hobby or perhaps as a extra¬vagant luxury. But this hard boiled notion belongs in a dreary world of robots. People need to behold beauty in order to be complete human beings. What's more, the beauty of a garden happens to work hand in glove with the plant world that provides our air and our daily diet.
Nature's plant world was established upon this planet many millions of years be¬fore the human family arrived to enjoy it. All the different plants were wild, living freely over the land and in the waters of the world. Some of them were the original ancestors of our cultivated crops and garden plants. Over the ages, man has used many techniques to improve plant strains and coax them to grow in new locations far from their native homes.
The dainty African violet is a native of the tropics that admiring visitors coaxed to live in cooler climates. In America it lives the life of a pampered potted plant. Botanists have improved the originals by selecting the best types and have crossed these types to produce a wondrous variety of different strains. Glamorous orchids have been taken from high in the boughs of tropical jungles and coaxed to live in northern greenhouses. Pollen from one gorgeous bloom has been used to fertilize another and the seeds have been pampered to produce an endless variety of super strains. The ancestors of our yummy camellias were brought from semitropical regions of China and Japan.
Many other glamorous garden bushes are sold as grafted plants. Anew plant pro¬duced by cross pollination may be rather fragile but its blossoms may be breathtaking. Twigs of the new plant are grafted onto a more sturdy root stock. The grafted plant emerges with the durable quality of the root plant plus the beauteous blossoms of the new strain. A hybrid rose is a grafted plant. The pollen from a lovely rose is placed on the stamens of a different one and the flower sealed from passing insects. Its ripened seed is gathered and sown and maybe one in many thousands just will produce a worthwhile strain. Its twigs are grafted onto the root stock of a rose plant that has proved itself able to thrive in normal garden conditions.
Experts are now combing fields of marigold colored marigolds to find a white mari¬gold. If such a rarity is found, its seed will be selected and tested. Then, if a few of its children are white, they will be tested and gradually a new strain of white marigolds will be produced by the process of selection. Nowadays, countless new strains of flowers are developed by large nurseries and amateur gardeners by using modern scientific methods. In the past, wild flowers were domesticated mainly by trial and error and the gradual improvement went on through centuries.
The man to thank for many of our modern methods of plant improvement is Luther Burbank. He used both cross pollination and selection. He crossed wild daisies from England, Japan and America to produce the garden variety Shasta daisy. The task took years of his life. But it taught him how to produce new strains of corn and other edible plants, including the white blackberry. Burbank crossed raspberries and wild dewberries and got the primus berry the very first new plant species created by nature plus the patient gardening hand of man.