#plant genetics

[intrinsically-disordered-proxein]

we are not getting out of the plant blog allegations with this one

[highretrogamelord]

An Introduction to: Plant Genetics (prototype) for the TI-99/4A

[sarahgrows]

White Wizard Propagation update: I plan on cutting off the old leaf when I tend to my plants tonight. I've noticed this as well, but there is some pink in my White Wizard stem! I did prop it in a different cup than the one White Princess prop I did, but they both sat together in a tub of vermiculite. I wonder if some genetics were mixed somehow?

Does anyone know?? Edit to add the mother plants: First two are the White Wizard

[99majo]

It’s come to my attention that there’s a shocking lack of current dahlia info and dahlia vibes on this website and frankly that don’t sit too well with me so I’m here to fix it

First, when you see blue dahlias for sale on lying icky websites, those are fake. Dahlias come in just about every shade and color there is, but a true-blue sure as shit ain’t one of ‘em (also blue is a rare color in nature, in general)

(Also, if you see someone selling dahlia seeds and it’s not advertised that they’re going to produce a variety of likely single-flowered, open-center blooms, you’re being lied to and tricked, so don’t fall for that and embarrass yourself and me also)

Dahlias are one of the coolest flowers ever and their unique genetic traits make them ideal for hybridizing, which is the reason why there are a million dahlias that look crazy different and yet, are all just different varieties of the same flower.

They can range from 4 ft tall to freaking like, 10 ft tall and they are bushy and grow from strong stalks into a branchy, beautifully herbaceous plant that can range in color from bright green to dark purples and maroons and almost-blacks. The varieties bred just for container-garden enjoyment are smaller, growing up to 3 feet tall-ish. The flowers themselves don’t have much of a scent besides the beautiful fresh-flower smell, but when you cut their long stems you’ll notice an intoxicating green, spicy scent! The insane variation and diversity found in dahlias has earned them their own categorization system, classifying each dahlia based on the shape, size, and presentation of their florets. There’s cactus-type, informal decorative, water lily, dinner plate, pompom, the list goes on.

You can grow dahlias for your cutting garden, as part of your beautiful flower farm, or just purely for your own joy and appreciation and as a gift for the pollinators and the birds and passerby’s. You can grow them in the dirt, in raised garden beds, and in suitably-sized containers. They like support for their height and branching habit, and if you provide them with nutrient-dense dirt to grown in, lots of water, and sunlight and heat, they’ll gift you in turn with the most amazing, eye-popping flowers you’ve ever seen. Your friends and family will think you’re magic for growing such an incredible plant, and you’ll find yourself mesmerized no matter how many seasons of dahlias you find yourself in.

Dahlias, like many wonderful things, originated in Mexico, and were a food crop for hundreds of years before they were ever of any interest for their flowers. Some dahlia farmers specifically grow varieties with the tubers that are the most delicious for eating, with the intent of re-popularizing them for food and not just flowers. I’ve never eaten one, but I love starchy vegetables in all their shapes and forms, and I’d be so down to try one with eggs and salsa and cotija 😩

I don’t recommend buying any old dahlia tuber and eating it, because for one, it’s gonna be nasty, it’ll be the most expensive nasty thing you’ve ever eaten, and also because most dahlias sold at garden stores and supermarkets are sourced in mass quantities from overseas suppliers such as Holland, making them more likely to suffer from rot and disease. I wouldn’t really want to have dahlia pukes and I don’t think you would either ngl

If you DO wanna grow dahlias from seed, for North America and US homies I recommend Renee’s Garden, Seed Saver’s Exchange, Johnny’s Seeds, and Uprising Seeds. At some point I’ll post seed sources to support Indigenous and Black seed savers and farmers here in this country but right now I’m doing dahlia education

A BIG thing to know about dahlias is this: flower farmers, such as myself, grow mainly from tubers, potato-esque chunks that grow and reproduce over the course of a season in the dirt under the dahlia plant, each of which contain exact genetic copies of the mother plant. You grow an Ivanetti dahlia from an Ivanetti tuber, you’ll get Ivanetti blooms, every time, no problem, easy peasy!

You can also take a plant tissue sample from an early sprouting on the dahlia tuber, called a cutting, which will also produce an exact genetic copy of the tuber from which it was taken. The catch there is that you can only take 7-10 ish cuttings from one tuber before it will be depleted, at which point it will no longer be strong enough to produce a whole healthy dahlia plant and will be tossed in the compost to decompose, as we all will someday

NOW, like I said a sec ago, if you let your dahlia flower be pollinated and it successfully produces viable seed for you to harvest, each one of those seeds will produce a totally distinct and unique new dahlia variety. It won’t be a masterpiece-work-of-art the first time around (probably), but it will be super weird and wonky and you can be excited as fuck that you now have a dahlia variety that no one else in the world has. If you really love your silly wild seed-grown dahlia, you can dig up the tuber(s) produced by the plant at the end of your season and save them for the next one!

If you’ve purchased your dahlia seeds from a farm who regularly supplies them, they will likely be from a fairly consistent group of dahlias that give consistent-enough flower results to group them together under one label. They’ll still all be varied, but not completely unique and brand-new-to-this-world.

Some dahlias are harder for pollinators to get to than others because of how many goddamn little flower petals they have, so many dahlia farmers do the deed for them and hand-pollinate using super advanced farming tools such as cotton tips or tweezers.

Each established dahlia variety has been bred and developed for YEARS by a dedicated farmer to isolate its genes and desirable traits and to make sure they’re stable! It’s a ton of work and time and investment into making a single new dahlia variety, and the varieties are in the THOUSANDS, so you are gonna APPRECIATE THEM

If you can think of a color and form for a dahlia to have, it just might be out there waiting for you, if not on Turtle Island then somewhere else that goes hard for dahlias. They’re grown and hybridized pretty much everywhere, and as a cut flower all the florists and designers want them and will gladly fight over them in a physical and violent altercation

Speaking of which, if you’re trying to have a wedding or an event or whatever and you want dahlias involved, go and look up when dahlias are in season for where you live. For one, dahlias are already a very expensive flower (for good reason), and locally-grown dahlias will always be highly superior to any that can be imported or flown in. Dahlias are a warm/hot season flower, and even when pre-sprouted or grown in a greenhouse, they take at least 90 days to start blooming.

So, if you live in a cold-ass midwestern US state and you want dahlias for your event, plan for a late summer/early fall date when local dahlia season will be peaking and you will have the best and most affordable dahlias available to you and your florist.

This seasonal floral shit should really be the rule when it comes to how we source flowers and plants for events, since it’s super bad for us flower growers/workers and the environment to primarily handle plants heavily treated with pesticides and toxic fertilizers. Rose farmers, especially in Columbia and Ecuador, get sick constantly from exposure to fumigants and fungicides, and many if not most mass-flower producers rely on exploiting the fuck out of their workers and paying them shit. You can find out lots about this on non-paywalled floral society websites. There’s also a really great book called Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart where all you non-florists non-flower farmers can find out that we’re definitely not “playing with flowers all day 🤪”

But anyways, I’m gonna do what I came here to do, and that is show you just a couple amazing dahlia cultivars to be entranced by. These pictures are just some screenshots I’ve collected on my phone over the years for field-layout and design planning, and are NOT my property in any way.

There are tons more revered and wonderful dahlia farmers and hybridizers than I could ever recount here, especially with just a few pics, and there are probably a few local dahlia farmers near you somewhere that you don’t even know about! If you have flower markets or farmer markets near you, go check out the flower selection sometime, and I bet you’ll see some amazing dahlias!

I left out a ton of important info on dahlias and how to grow them, these are just the bare-minimum basics which I’m contributing to spice up the world of dahlias on tumblr because, as I said, I simply can’t be doing with the lack of amazing flower pics and info on here. If you wanna learn more about dahlias, Sarah Raven has books, Floret Flowers has books, Gabriela at La Musa De Las Flores has books, and they all have instagram too. There’s so much information out there on dahlias and flowers of every kind, and you should check it out!

We can’t grow food if we don’t have flowers, and besides, I don’t think I need to convince a website full of artists and weirdos that flowers are just necessary, regardless.

In case I can’t individually label each photo, none of these pics are mine and they each belong to the flower farms advertising them on their websites and their respective photographers who truly GET how to take flower pics. These flower farms are US or Mexico based and include:

Farmhouse Flower Farm

La Musa De Las Flores

Flowerwell

Sarah Raven

Floret Flowers

The Flower Hat

PlantGem

This is an official dahlia post 🌸 you’re welcome

SOAK IT UP Y’ALL, DAHLIAS ARE INCREDIBLE

[thebashfulbotanist]

For this Wednesday's Weed, we have common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. It's not as invasive as some weeds in Washington State, but it can become established in giant patches in disturbed areas, like this clearcut on Tiger Mountain.

It's fatally toxic to humans and livestock due to the cardiac glycosides in its leaves, flowers, and seeds, but as a result it's also useful to us. Common foxglove is the original source of cardiac glycosides used in the heart medication digoxin, which is sometimes just called digitalis, just like the genus. The origin of the common name is pretty cute - common foxglove often grows around fox dens because of the disturbed ground, so people would say that foxes would put the flowers on their feet as tiny gloves to help them walk softly. It’s still often sold as an ornamental plant in Washington, and there are some interesting hybrid cultivars available. Despite being nonnative and toxic to mammals, bees and hummingbirds love it. 

If you've ever taken a beginning genetics course, you might be familiar with common foxglove because its petal colors are an excellent example of dominant epistatis and the way in which the plant's genotype influences its phenotype for petal colors. I learned about it in my college beginning genetics class, but for this post I referred to (An Introduction to Genetic Analysis. 7th edition).

The three alleles controlling petal color are: M - Responsible for producing purple anthocyanin pigment. A recessive m/m will result in no purple pigment production at all, so the flowers will be all white with only faint yellowish spots. D - Responsible for determining how much purple anthocyanin pigment is produced. D/d and D/D will result in a lot of purple pigment being produced IF it can be (i.e., if the plant is M/m or M/M), so the plant will be dark purple. If the plant is d/d, it'll be light purple. W - Responsible for determining where purple anthocyanin is deposited. W/W and W/w have pigment only deposited on the throat spots, while w/w will have pigment deposited all over.

This means the four possible phenotypes for petal color are: Dark purple - this plant has M/-, D/-, and w/w. Light purple - this plant has M/-, d/d, and w/w. White with purple spots - this plant has M/-, D/- or d/d, and W/-. White - this plant has m/m, D/- or d/d, and W/- or w/w.

The concept of dominant epistatis comes in because the dominant allele W overrides D/- and d/d, so a plant with W/- will always be white, either with purple spots or no spots at all. You have no idea what combination of D alleles a white with purple spots flower has, because the dominant W masks its effect.

Interestingly, all of the foxgloves I found in the massive patch on Tiger Mountain were either all white, light purple, or dark purple. Not a single one was white with purple spots! That photo was taken a different day on  the other side of the mountain. This means all flowers in that first patch were recessive w/w, so the purple pigment could be produced all over the entire flower.

[quotesfromall]

But the potential was clear. Soon, by exposing large numbers of seeds and young plants, scientists produced many more mutations and found a few hidden beneficial ones. Peanuts got tougher hulls. Barley, oats and wheat got better yields. Black currants grew.

William J. Broad, Useful Mutants

[intelligentliving]

Scientists Improve Crop Security By Successfully Editing A Long-locked Part Of Plant DNA

For the first time, Japanese researchers have found a way to edit the mitochondrial DNA of plants, curing infertility in rice and canola.

[er-cryptid]

Gregor Mendel

-- born July 20, 1822

-- Austrian

-- founder of modern genetics

-- Augustinian friar

-- abbot of St. Thomas’ Abbey

-- studied seven characteristics of pea plants      -- height      -- pod shape      -- pod color      -- seed shape      -- seed color      -- flower position      -- flower color

-- coined “dominant” and “recessive”

-- died January 6, 1884

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