Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/372

368 selected from among them those varying in a similar direction, raised new generations from them and so on until now he who wishes may have his California poppies of a strange glowing crimson for the price of a little package of seed, where formerly he was perforce content with the golden orange. For me the golden orange suffices, but that does not detract from my eager interest in the flower-painting methods of Mr. Burbank. Even more striking a result is his blue Shirley poppy, produced also solely by repeated selection from the crimson field poppy of Europe. "We have long had various shades of black and crimson and white poppies, but no shade of blue. Out of 200,000 seedlings I found one showing a faintest trace of sky blue and planted the seed from it, and got next year one pretty blue one out of many thousand, and now I have one almost pure blue."

But another brilliant new poppy was made in a different way. The pollen of Papaver pilosum, a butter-colored poppy, was put on the pistils of the Bride, a common pure white variety of Papaver somniferum (double), and in the progeny of this cross was got a fire-colored single form. The character of singleness was common to the ancestors of both parents, the character of fire color in the lineage of somniferum only, although the red of the new form is brighter than ever before known in the somnifera series. Both characteristics were absent (or rather latent) in both parents. And yet the perturbing influence of the hybridization brought to the fore again these ancestral characters. The foliage of this fire poppy is intermediate in type between that of the two parents.

The history of the stoneless and seedless plum, now being slowly developed by Burbank, shows an interesting combination of selection, hybridization and reselecting. Mr. Burbank found a plum in a small wild plum species with only a part of a stone. He crossed this wild species with the French prune; in the first generation he got most individuals with whole stones, some with parts of a stone, and even some with no stone. Through three generations he has now carried his line by steadily selecting, and the percentage of no-stone fruits is slowly increasing, while quality, beauty and productiveness are also increasing at the same time.

The plum-cot is the result of crossing the Japanese plum and the apricot. The plum-cot, however, has not yet become a fixed variety and may never be, as it tends to revert to the plum and apricot about equally, although with also a tendency to remain fixed, which tendency may be made permanent.

Most of Burbank's plums and prunes are the result of multiple crossings in which the Japanese plums have played an important part. Hundreds of thousands of seedlings have been grown and carefully worked over in the twenty years of experimenting with plums, and single trees