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Some growers transfer the pollen with a camel's-hair-brush; others by pulling off the corolla and adhering anthers and rubbing them over the stigma of other flowers. Fruit rarely follows flowers that are not pollinated, and if it is incomplete the fruit will be unsymmetrical and imperfectly developed.
Most of them had neatly striped flowers, some displayed broader stripes and spare flowers were seen with one half wholly red. Four individuals were found with only uniform red flowers. These were isolated and artificially pollinated, and the same was done with some of the best striped individuals.
There is one other important point arguing strongly for the independent appearance of the peloric form in its several localities. It is the difficulty of fertilization and the high degree of sterility, even if artificially pollinated. Bees and bumble-bees are unable to crawl into the narrow tubular flowers, and to bring the fertilizing pollen to the stigma.
Many of them contain no good seeds at all; from others I have succeeded in saving only a hundred seeds from thousands of capsules. These seeds, if purely pollinated, and with the exclusion of the visits of insects, reproduce the variety, entirely and without any reversion to the lamarckiana type. Correlated with the detailed structures is the form of the flower-buds.
Occasionally the anther valves do not open freely enough to permit the escape of pollen, which may then be taken out with a narrow-bladed penknife, or better with a little instrument made of a flattened pin fixed in a wooden handle. The pollinated blooms should immediately be covered with the netting, which should remain until they fade.
According to the general rule of pedigree-culture, the seeds of each individual plant are always saved and sowed separately. This is done even with such species as the clover, which are infertile when self-pollinated, and which are incapable of artificial pollination on the required scale, since each flower produces only one seed. My clover was always left free to be pollinated by insects.
It consists of hybrids of G. Saundersii pollinated with the finest Gandavensis varieties. Lemoine's New Blue was first exhibited at the Chicago Exposition 1893 and placed on sale the following year. Gladiolus Princeps, Childsii x G. cruentus, the finest scarlet variety ever raised, was introduced in 1903. Gladiolus primulinus and hybrids were first publicly offered in 1909. Hybridizing Gladiolus.
This, however, is not the case, at least not in the present instance. I have pollinated a number of plants, grown from seed of the same strain and combined them in pairs, and excluded the visits of insects, and pollen other than that of the plant itself and that of the specimen with which it was paired. The result was that some pairs were fertile and others barren.
I pollinated this flower myself, and it produced abundant fruit with enough seeds for the entire culture in 1892, and they only were sown. Until this year my generations required two years each, owing to the perennial habit of the plants. In this way the prospects of the culture began to decrease, and I proposed to try to heighten my chances by having a new generation yearly.
This peculiarity has attracted the attention both of horticulturists and of botanists. As a rule not all the stamens are changed in this way but only those of the innermost rows. The outer stamens remain normal and fertile, and the flowers, when pollinated with their own pollen, bear as rich a harvest of seeds as other opium-poppies.
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