It is well known to cultivators of the Camellia that the venerable
President of the American Pomological Society, the Hon. Marshall P.
Wilder, achieved great success in the raising of new varieties, yielding
double flowers, from seed hybridized by himself, and that many of the
flowers raised by him were exquisite models of perfection of form. This
marked success he attributes largely to three things, first, that in the
selection of the seed-bearing parent he used hybrids, believing that
every change effected by cross-fertilization is a remove from the normal
form, and therefore more easily susceptible of continued mutations;
second, that in the selection of the flower to be impregnated he had
special reference to the strength and prominence of the style, the form
of the corolla, and the perfection of its petals; and third, that he
used only pollen taken from an anther which was supported by a petaloid
stamen, that is, a stamen which had taken on the form, more or less, of
a petal. He regarded this petaloid form of the stamen as the incipient
stage towards a full petalous form, and that when he fertilized such
flowers with this petaloid pollen, he was more likely to secure double
seedlings, with petals more or less multiplied, and oftentimes perfectly
double, than when the pollen was taken from anthers borne upon perfect
stamens. And the larger and better developed the petaloid stamen was,
that is, the more nearly the stamen had taken on the form of a petal,
the better the chance for obtaining finely formed double flowers. His
experiments led him to the conclusion that single or semi-double flowers
with perfect corollas are more certain to produce flowers of a regular
symmetrical formation, than those whose corollas have been irregular,
with considerable variation in the size and form of the different
petals; and likewise that when the style was feeble, distorted, or
imperfectly developed, the results were likely to be very
unsatisfactory.
As some of our readers are making experiments in the production of
double flowers, we hope they will give us the results of their labors
for publication.
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