God forbid that we should seriously start talking about the taxonomy of
bow-wows...
Seriously, I think that hybridizing these smelly monsters is really quite an
innocuous and interesting past-time, however, I share many others' concern
that these bastard children will ultimately find there way into the trade as
"pure" species and cause genuine problems for plant breeders somewhere down
the line.
As an example, I would defy anyone to show me a pure Anthurium crystallinum
in the hort trade these days, in spite of the fact that it's been cultivated
for well over a century and is "common" in cultivation. We have had several
back and forths here on the forum on the nebulous origins of many readily
available hybrids, and Donna Atwood is still (I believe) engaged in the
Herculean task of sorting out hybrid/cultivar/cultigen, etc registry for
aroids. I do believe that many of our wards are represented in cultivation
by a limited genetic sample (sometimes derived from single seed lots or
mother plants) and an effort should be made to improve this situation,
wherever possible. I also suspect that some reputedly "difficult-to-grow"
species might be a manifestation of this very same problem.
My dos centavos, anyhoots.
As for Amorphophallus titaNUM (sorry for the previous mis-spells): I say -
don't be faint-hearted here, let's do transgenic work with Komodo Dragons to
produce horrendous, smelly, giant foot-eating, Indonesian plantizards
(Varanus titanovomitivus).
Cheerio -
Jota
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