Can commercially produced hardy water lily cultivars cross with wild types?

[saint_abyssal]

If I had a pond with both wild-type N. odorata and any given commercially available hardy water lily, could these cross pollinate and produce offspring?

 

[mrsclem]

Waterlilies are not usually grown from seed. Most are grown from root cuttings. I have had lilies for many years and have never seen seeds. You could experiment and try cross- pollinating and see if you can harvest seeds.

 

[Joshaeus]

Depends on the commercial cultivar. Most marliac hybrids (eg Helvola) are sterile or nearly so; most other hardy cultivars are fertile. Tropical lilies are rarely sterile but also seldom cross-pollinate with any hardies without human intervention, and many of the resulting seeds are non viable. If seeds are produced from any waterlily cross, it usually takes several years for the offspring (which could look VERY different from its parents) to reach blooming size.

 

[saint_abyssal]

(which could look VERY different from its parents)

How so?

 

[Joshaeus]

How so?

Let's illustrate this with dogs - if a purebred german shepherd had puppies with a purebred poodle, odds are pretty good the puppies are going to look significantly different than either parent even though you know the bloodline of the parents; if two mixed breed dogs of unknown/highly mixed parentage have puppies, you have even less of an idea what the puppies are going to look like. The same is true with water lilies - perhaps more so, as most commercial water lilies are hybrids of different species (or earlier hybrids of those species) rather than simply morphs of the same subspecies like dogs are. Since we don't usually know what cultivars are in the bloodlines of our plants, the resulting hybrids can have very unexpected traits (in contrast to, say, water lilies propagated by division, which are virtually always identical to the original water lilies).

That's not entirely a bad thing, though...after all, such a process is how many modern water lily cultivars came to be - a single chance, highly unexpected (but spectacular) plant from two very different parent lilies.

 

[saint_abyssal]

This is really interesting. Not to pester you, but do you have any specific examples?

 

[Joshaeus]

This is really interesting. Not to pester you, but do you have any specific examples?

I'm not sure this is what you were looking for, but there is a tropical cultivar ('blue smoke') that was a chance seedling of 'green smoke' (the first water lily with green flowers) and which, in turn, produced a chance seedling that became a second green cultivar ('green wonder'). Blue smoke and green wonder were both chance, unplanned seedlings. Keep in mind that both of blue smoke's parents were probably green smoke, and both of green wonder's parents were probably blue smoke (green wonder appeared unexpectedly among a group of blue smoke waterlilies)...just imagine the chaos that ensues if water lilies of different cultivars hybridize.

 

[saint_abyssal]

Cool. That example works for me.