Galanthus January 2009

[Brian Ellis]

Nice to see Baylham out Steve, mine are only just coming through! 

[johnw]

Everyone must be tired of the Rosemary Burnham posts but here it is with a different slant.

Photo #1 - Flower before emasculation

Photo #2 - Flower post emasculation

Photo #3 - Interior showing the anthers extracted with an extremely sharply point pair of tweezer with a steady tug, careful not to damage the stigma. The flower has been selfed.

Photo #4 - Anthers placed in a medicine capsule and shaken to release the pollen.  Quite a copious amount of pollen from one flower. having been placed in a capsule with the anthers (no palm readings please unless you see a revival of stocks in the very near future)

The pollen capsule will now go into the refrigerator for 48 hours to get desiccated. Then it will be mailed off in a plastic bag with a tiny bit of desiccant to a budding hybridizer on the forum. It would be nice to get Rosemary's pollen on vigorous greens, even x Scharlockii might be interesting.

johnw

[johnw]

Baylham and Sickle today.

Steve  - What a brute that Baylham is!  Lovely, so full and rounded.

johnw

[mark smyth]

I dont know Baylham. Can someone post some info please

[steve owen]

  Mark
I'll get out in the garden tomorrow and post a pic of the whole plant + dimensions.

[Maggi Young]

I'm thinking poor drainage, holding water too long and too close together. Of course bulbs in pots can suffer from these conditions but most of us will have one species/cultivar per pot. It the garden the various snowdrops wont be so close together.

Balderdash! A properly made fishbox trough, whether or not constructed to the aesthetic standards of the SRGC, can provide a perfectly happy plant home. When using a fish box or any other styrofoam container as a planter, adequate holes should be made in the base to allow water to drain freely... the substrate used should be mixed to a suitable recipe to provide a free-draining mix.  If these requirements are not met, is it the fault of the gardener, not the container!  

[Maggi Young]

Mark
I'll get out in the garden tomorrow and post a pic of the whole plant + dimensions.

Here's hoping the weather is good enough for that! Is it a double flower, Steve?

[Anthony Darby]

I dont know Baylham. Can someone post some info please

Baylham is named by Barry Carson Turner after a small village in west Sussex [correction Suffolk]and is a plicatus hybrid double. Mine are just poking through. Here's a link: http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=1498.15

[Diane Whitehead]

Well, at last the sun is showing after a couple of weeks of fog.  Even
 snowdrops in the unheated greenhouse haven't opened their flowers
because of the gloom.

Outside, they are delayed.  The early ones were flowering in early
December, and then were flattened by almost a metre of snow which
hung around for a couple of weeks.  The snow has gone except for
dirty piles in parking lots where the plows deposited it. 

I was just checking pots in the unheated greenhouse, and discovered
19 neglected ones under the bench.  Last spring I bought a hundred
or so pots of elwesii from a wholesaler. Each pot had four bulbs, and
of course, most were not distinctive at all. After they died down, I
removed the ones that were different and put them in small pots
with a spoonful of soil to keep them from drying out over the summer.
They were still in these almost-empty pots, and amazingly, most are
putting up flower buds.  Poor things, but what a will to live.  They are
now tucked up in full pots of soil.

[Brian Ellis]

Anthony, I think you may be mistaken about Baylham being in Sussex.  It is just outside Great Blakenham in Suffolk as far as I know, and that is what Barrie told me last year.

[Anthony Darby]

My mistake. I didn't write it down, but knew it wasn't Surrey. 

[Maggi Young]

Surrey, Suffolk, Sussex...... you mean there's a difference? 

[Brian Ellis]

looks a bit like a mobile phone, top right-ish, next to a camera icon

Holding tongue Maggi 

Anthony, an easy mistake to make.  I put all mine in a database so as soon as I have any information in it goes - otherwise I would happily think it came from Bristol or Bullawayo!  Mind you I still put it in Streetmap to double check

[Diane Clement]

Galanthus Galatea doing nicely with a little bit of sun today

[Maggi Young]

These 'drops are photogenic, I'll give 'em that!   Lovely portrait, Diane!