* Starting with ‘Big Boy’ in the ’40s, plants created from distinct parents have filled a niche not only in the home garden but in farm fields.
Mention hybrids to a group of gardeners and you’re likely to get several reactions. Some shun hybrids, others embrace them, and some gardeners aren’t sure what they are.
To clear up the confusion: A hybrid is the first generation (F-1) of a cross between two parents of the same type of plant.
For instance, breeders will cross two tomato varieties to make an F-1 hybrid that exhibits the early maturity of one tomato and the great flavor of another. The traits are uniform only in the first generation of seed.
Open-pollinated (OP) plants, on the other hand, are what we’ve had since the beginning of time. They are not crosses but plant varieties that have the ability to cross-pollinate among themselves by natural means such as wind and bees, and they produce the same plant.
Though we still grow many OP plants, we also cultivate a wide variety of popular hybrids that originated from OP plants, such as ‘Early Girl’ and ‘Celebrity’ tomatoes. Many eggplants, peppers and melons are also hybrids.
Some vegetables, such as beans, peas and lettuce, are not hybridized, but most are. They are the most widely hybridized of plants, although there are some woody ornamental and annual hybrids.
One of the first hybrids introduced to the gardening public was a tomato, says Jim Waltrip, director of Seminis Garden in Saticoy. Seminis Garden is a division of Seminis Vegetable Seeds, a vegetable seed breeder, developer and producer that provides hybrid vegetable seed to companies over the world.
“In the late 1940s, Burpee [W. Atlee Burpee & Co.] came up with ‘Big Boy,’ which the company owner named after his baby son,” says Waltrip.
At the time, horticulturists considered hybridized seed a novelty that wouldn’t extend beyond the home market.
“Hybridizing some seed, such as cucumber, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and squash, can be done by bees. But hybridizing tomato and pepper seed must be done by hand and is a very labor-intensive process that involves opening up the plant flowers, removing the male parts and then returning the next day and hand-pollinating and marking the tomatoes,” says Waltrip.
“Because of all this, experts originally thought that hybrid seed would prove too costly for commercial growers.”
Many growers, however, discovered the benefits of hybrids. Traits for which commercial growers were willing to pay included superior disease resistance, uniform vegetables and fruit, and reliable productivity.
Today, a great majority of crops are hybrid. “Virtually all fresh market tomatoes are hybrid, and 90% of processing tomatoes,” says Waltrip.
Home gardeners have also turned to hybrids over the years, says Renee Shepherd, owner of Renee’s Garden Seeds in Felton.
“Without hybridization, we wouldn’t have a lot of the wonderful produce varieties that are available now,” she says. “Vegetables and hybrid flowers–like the new, pollen-free, long-lasting, multibranching sunflowers–are great introductions to the garden.”
If it weren’t for hybridizing, we wouldn’t have a lot of the improved varieties of plants that we have, says Wende Proud, horticulturist and product manager for Monrovia Nursery Co., a wholesale grower in Azusa.
“A lot of straight species of plants are very limited in color and growth habit and the geographic area in which they can grow,” she says. “With hybridization, there’s been some amazing introductions in recent years. It’s getting to the point that if you give plant breeders enough time, they’ll produce a disease-resistant plant able to grow in your area in the color and size you want.”
In many ways, hybridizing has allowed breeders to improve on Mother Nature and create perfect plants.
“Typically, if breeders can make a plant compact, disease resistant and long-blooming with striking flower colors or variegated foliage, then we’ve got a plant that will eventually become a mainstay in gardens,” says Proud. “All of this wouldn’t be possible without hybridization.”
The staff at Monrovia doesn’t perform the hybridizing but buys new hybrids and markets them, often on an exclusive basis, says Dennis Connor, director of products at Monrovia.
They look for “sports” on already hybridized plants, that is, a branch or flower that is different from the original plant. A plant with an all-green leaf may produce a branch with a variegated leaf. This different branch is then propagated and may end up becoming a new, marketable plant.
This attention to hybrids and sports is not to say that experts aren’t still interested in open-pollinated plants.
“Gardeners can and should celebrate diversity and use a combination of hybrids and OP varieties in their yards,” says Shepherd. “If, for instance, you have nematodes or fusarium wilt in your soil, you’ll probably want to use hybrid tomatoes that are resistant to those problems. If soil-borne disease isn’t a problem, then maybe you’ll enjoy growing old OP tomatoes.”
Because hybrids tend to dominate the market, there have been fears about losing old OP varieties, but Waltrip says he isn’t worried.
“At Seminis, we maintain all of the old OP seeds in our germ plasm bank,” he says. “We also want diversity and don’t want to lose those lines, because it’s the diversity that creates such good hybrids.”
