Many ordinary gardeners have become new variety developers or hybridizers. Hundreds of gardeners have taken the simplest way to new variety development by being keen observers of their favorite flowers. A gardener may have observed many varieties of their favorite flower in various gardens and read about them in magazines, books and on the internet.
The gardener notices a plant in his/her own garden which is different than anything he has seen or read about. He divides or takes cuttings so he can share the plant with others. He may also save seed from the new selection and plant it to compare to the mother plant. Before he claims the plant as his own, he should check carefully to make sure that it is not already owned by someone else.
The next stage of new plant development is to make an intentional cross between two plants of the same or closely related species. For example you might cross a tall Columbine plant with large flowers with a smaller plant with small flowers to see if you could come up with a small plant with large flowers.
After some study he finds that he must open one of the flowers and remove the anthers before they have developed pollen. This prevents self-pollination. Then he carefully picks some anthers from the other parent plant and places them on the first parent plant when the pistil is sticky and receptive. Then he puts a bag over the pollinated flower to make sure no pollen from another source can reach the pistil.
The gardener is surprised when the seed produced from his cross has 100 percent small plants with small flowers. After some study about plant genetics he concludes that both plant size and flower size are controlled by a dominant/recessive gene combination.
Most of us are familiar with the dominant/recessive character of human eye color. Brown eyes are dominant to blue. When one parent has brown eyes and the other parent has blue eyes, the resulting children will have brown eyes. However, if the brown-eyed parent was the offspring of a blue-eyed/brown-eyed combination of parents, about half of his children will have brown eyes and half will have blue eyes.
Realizing the probable nature of these genes, the gardener collects seed from several self-pollinated plants to see if he can find a double recessive for large flower size combined with a small plants in the next generation.
You can see that becoming a hybridizer of new plants is a multiyear project.
