Lynn Slight?

calico20hill

Steve, Is THIS! Yyur Lynn Slight? I Know I have tried it before and not gotten a good plant going but you sent me a nice start this year and I don't see anything else that could be it. I am sure I had a tag with it to start, but wel, things happen. Anyway this one knocked my socks off in the garden today! It is much more of a blue purple then I thought it would be and a larger flower, I would guess 5" THe center is so dark that it looks black. When I looked up a description of Lynn Slight it said it could be red violet to a purplish color but this is just Light concord grape going to the deepest almost black purple!

SteveM

calico20hill Noni. I'm glad you got some good stock. Lynn Slight is a nice cut variety and the (smallish) tubers must keep well because I notice she is still around after almost 20 years. She is a seedling of Alpen Steve, a BB FD White, that my father named after his favorite son.😊

calico20hill

Well, I am just thrilled to have her! I picked it and have it by my chair and every time I look up she knocks my socks off again! What a stem she has, also! I will hope for enough tubers to propagate more stock. IS ALPEN STEVE (THE DAHLIA) Still around? And does Lynn Slight make seeds?

Bessie

calico20hill I grew Lynn Slight last year, and I agree it's a beautiful Dahlia. I got zero seeds from her last year, and the bees had free reign on lots and lots of blooms. I got really excited to hear her parent Alpen Steve was white. I nursed a cutting all winter long in my kitchen window sill, and she started blooming several weeks ago in my garden.

SteveM

calico20hill And does Lynn Slight make seeds

Yes, but not many. I remove all of the florets to make it it more convenient for the bees to get to the center. I have had better luck using her pollen in hand crosses. This year I am back-crossing the children from a Blizzard X Lynn Slight cross to get a Lynn Slight bloom on a Blizzard plant.

calico20hill

The center is so full on this one maybe the bees can't get to the pollen? I don't think I have ever seen such a good center on a dahlia this size.

calico20hill

Noni Morrison lilymolady@gmail.com

10:10 PM (0 minutes ago)

OK, I am going to try some cuttings even though it is way late. If I can get any to root they can be pot roots for next spring. And of course we hope she will make enough tubers to carry on.

SteveM

I have a few Alpen Steve I keep for breeding because it has produced nice cut seedlings in just about every color. The plant habit is not great on Alpen Steve, it sends up too many stems and they get thin very early in the season. Also, both A. Steve and Lynn Slight are very prone to getting powdery mildew. They are the canaries in the mine I watch to let me know when it is time (past time) to spray fungicides.

calico20hill

OH. Good to know about the powdery mildew. I'll plant it at the top of the garden next year. Its always the bottom of the garden where mildew starts first. NO sign yet this year thank goodness. Last year it was awful.

Bessie

SteveM what colors did you get in the Lynn Slight x Blizzard cross? With Lynn Slight's parentage, perhaps 25 % would be white? The inheritance of color is something very few people talk about(with the exception of @Teddahlia ) perhaps because it's so complex in an octoploid plant, and there are no real hard fast rules for inheritance. In last year's Dahlia plot Lynn Slight was only a foot away from the Alloway Candy, so I may have Lynn Slight genetics in some of the seedlings.

SteveM

Bessie what colors did you get in the Lynn Slight x Blizzard cross? With Lynn Slight's parentage, perhaps 25 % would be white?

I only had three seedlings from the hand cross of Blizzard X Lynn Slight and they were all white, slightly larger than Blizzard and one with a slight lav blush. Last year I planted the 3 seedlings in isolation and let the bees cross all 3 with each other. This year I am evaluating about 25 of the seedlings from that cross.
Estimating the expected % of white seedlings in this cross would be impossible without knowing the colors from the parents going back several generations. Even with that information it would still be a guess - just a better guess. I think that is why some of the most successful breeders stress the importance of having a plan when you set out to breed dahlias. Keeping good records of seed parents though several generations would help predict the outcome of a new cross and hint at what seed parents have the best odds of producing the desired results.

Teddahlia

According to Virginia Walbot, white in dahlias is caused by the failure of the other colors to form and the resulting flower is white(perhaps stays white may be more accurate). This can happen at numerous "levels" of pigment formation. Simple language: colors are pigments and they need lots of chemicals added to them to form the darker colors. If the darker color progression fails at any of the numerous steps the flower can remain white. How can you breed for the failure of pigment to form? White is problematic color and added to that is that there are different versions of white. For example. some whites are very light yellows.