Gesneriad Society Convention 2009: Show

This group of sinningias was exhibited by Dave Zaitlin.

Dave wrote the following explanation for his exhibit, which he titled "Plants that Shouldn't Be".

Sinningia 'Ozark Scentimental Journey' is a special hybrid created by David Harris and Dale Martens that came from crossing a miniature sinningia cultivar with Sinningia guttata. Because this was a tetraploid (4N) x diploid (2N) cross, the expectation is that the progeny are triploid (3N), and hence would be sterile due to the presence of unpaired chromosomes at meiosis. However, Dale managed to self this hybrid, and I was able to successfully cross 'OSJ' as a female with two different wild collections of Sinningia speciosa. Fertile F1 progeny resulted from pollinations with S. speciosa 'Carangola' and 'Massaguassu - caulescens' (parents grown from Mauro Peixoto's seed). The four F2 plants displayed here came from self-pollinating two different F1s, both of which had partially peloric flowers; the two on the left are from ['OSJ' x 'Carangola'] and the two on the right from ['OSJ' x 'Massaguassu']. Plants with fully peloric flowers were present in both progeny sets. While I cannot explain the fertility of 'Ozark Scentimental Journey', I know that the F2 plants with erect flowers carry two copies of a gene from S. guttata that is segregating in these crosses. Another conceptually difficult issue is flower color in the F2s, which ranges from pure white to burgundy. Given that 'OSJ' has dark wine-red flowers and that its unnamed tetraploid miniature parent had red flowers, I would expect more of these plants to have darkly pigmented corollas in shades of red to purple. Also, the distinctive pattern of corolla spotting in S. guttata flowers is entirely absent in all of the F2 progeny that have flowered to date.