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Updated: June 28, 2025
Here we have the true type of an ever-sporting variety. Every year it produces in the same way heirs and atavists. Every plant, if fertilized with its own pollen, gives rise to both types. The parent itself may be tricotylous or dicotylous, or show any amount of multiplication and cleavage in its seed-leaves, but it always gives the entire range among its progeny of the variation.
They may be borne by the same racemes, or on different branches, or some seedlings from the same parent-plant may bear monochromatic flowers while others may be striped. Such deviations are usually called sports. But they occur yearly and regularly and may be observed invariably when the cultures are large enough. Such a variety I shall call "ever-sporting."
Obviously the extreme limit, under the conditions of climate and soil, has been reached. This extreme type is always dependent upon repeated selection. No constant variety, in the older sense, has been obtained, nor was any indication afforded that such a type might ever be produced. On the contrary, it is manifest that the new form belongs to the group of ever-sporting varieties.
But this is not always the case. The colors of such a race may repeat for themselves the peculiarities of the ever-sporting characters. It often happens that one color is more or less strictly allied to the doubles, and another to the singles. This sometimes makes it difficult to keep the various colors true.
It is very probable, from a theoretical point of view, that such differences exist, but perhaps they are so slight, as to have practically no bearing on the question. On the ground of their wide range of variability, the double varieties must be regarded as pertaining to the group of ever-sporting forms.
From this discussion we seem justified in concluding that the original appearance of the upright type was of the nature of systematic atavism. It differs however, from the already detailed cases in that it is not a monstrosity, nor an ever-sporting race, but is as constant a form as the best variety or species.
Before looking closer into the hereditary peculiarities of this old and interesting ever-sporting variety, it may be as well to give a short description of the plants with double flowers. Generally speaking there are two principal types of doubles. One is by the conversion of stamens into petals, and the other is an anomaly, known under the name of petalomany.
In respect to the variability, the variety belongs to the ever-sporting group, constituting a type which is more closely related to the "five-leaved" clover than to the striped flowers or even the double stocks. It fluctuates around an average type with half filled crowns, going as far as possible in both directions, but never transgressing either limit.
They never give seed which results in doubles, providing all intercrossing is excluded. The other varieties are ever-sporting, in the sense of this term previously assumed, but with the restriction that the sports are exclusively one-sided, and never return, owing to their absolute sterility. The oldest double varieties of stocks have attained an age of a century and more.
Such forms have been included in previous lectures among the ever-sporting varieties, because their peculiar characters oscillate between two extremes, viz: the new one of the variety and the corresponding character of the original species.
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