First Blush Seedling

[waldo]

Here are some pictures of an open pollinated First Blush seedling. I purchased the seeds from Jim's Hostas and they were planted December 19, 2016. The first leaves were just green with red petioles, however the last leaf to unfurl has quite a bit of red on the underside of the leaf tip. It does show through to the leaf surface to some degree. I will grow it on for further evaluation.

[waldo]

Here is the same seedling with the similar pictures taken on my deck in natural light.

[Tigger]

Interesting. I can see First Blush as a breakthrough in breeding, but at the same time see that the ultimate result of this breeding will be a hosta that is, more or less, the color of ... mulch. Might be interesting in a pot. Or when someone gets a nice variegation on it, which might have pinky-orange hues.

David

[Chris_W]

I never really thought about a red hosta disappearing into the mulch, but that sure sounds like a possibility. Maybe combine it with a bright green fern or a yellow hosta so that it stands out more?

And Waldo, that is great to see that First Blush seedlings could show some promise. As a patented plant we can't divide it, so maybe I'll just have to save a bunch of seeds and see where that takes us

thanks for sharing!

chris

[waldo]

This is a picture of the flower scape of the First Blush seedling in this thread. The flower is not intact as I had already started to pollinate before I remembered this thread. As you can see I have removed some to all of the tepals. No need to remove the stamens because there is little to no pollen on the anthers. The flower has good red/pink color and if you look at the pedicels of the unopened buds you can see the intense color there. This seedling has purple with no pollen anthers on contorted filaments of varying lengths. The style is made up of individual strands sometimes fused at the stigma, sometimes not. Ovary is dark burgundy. I will post more later.

[waldo]

I took a couple of pictures of the newly opened flowers this morning. As you can see red, pink and lavender can be to hard to distinguish.I think this was mainly due to the light. The first picture is the most accurate to my eye. This is why flower color is so elusive.