Journal of Horticulture and Practical Gardening, 1: 312-313 (July 23, 1861)
INFLUENCE OF THE
POLLEN IN THE SAME FLOWER
Donald Beaton
Variegation is a consequence of some condition of the pollen, be it foreign or natural; and the new discovery about the origin of races is the surest witness we have, that to enable plants to continue true and healthy, strong and lasting in their generations, Nature has invested the pollen with the power of keeping up the stock. The strongest and the healthiest plant of a kind is able to take the lead on the stigma over ten other plants that are less likely to do credit to the family name. I have asserted that long enough, and here is the proof out of Baron Hugel seed-pods. I can bring you a plant, a seedling, that will be twice as strong as the Baron, and out of the same truss another seedling that will not be so strong as he, nor like him in appearance; and in another cross, or in a third one, according to the strength of my chief ancestor, I shall show you a plant which, probably, you would not acknowledge to belong to the same section as the Baron, and all from the pollen of one flower.
In the great bulk of the Scarlet or Horseshoe Geraniums there are but seven stamens, four long ones, one of medium length, but which is often wanting, and two almost sessile like the anthers of Wheat—that is, very short indeed, and opening at the bottom face to face. These two are they which reduce a whole family to beggary; first to dwarfs or Tom Thumbs, or better still, to minimums, or the smallest of that kind consistent with vigour sufficient to become a useful plant in cultivation, and, lastly, to the brink of ruin, and drive that race out of existence altogether, if there were not other means provided to arrest the decline, or keep it from manifesting itself at all in a state of Nature.
Now, it is wonderful how simple things are when once we know them; but it is more wonderfully simple how I find out that mystery. You recollect how I said my seeds were sown and labelled; it was by taking every pod or beak from the truss of a Geranium just before the seeds were quite ripe, and planting the pods round the sides of pots, like one row of cuttings. If the pod was full there would be five seedlings to every bunch of them as they appeared. My number for Baron Hugel is fifteen, and all seeds of the Baron have that number on the face of the tally, and the number of the pollen kind is cut on the edge of the same tally. Now, as my experimental seeds could never get mixed by this method, and, as often happened, the tally with fifteen on the face, and eighteen (Stella) on the edge, showed whole bunches of very stout seedlings, and other bunches with very delicate ones, as appeared to me. There is nothing in these things without a cause, if we did but know it; and I puzzled my brains for two or three years before I discovered the real cause, and I made some of the most foolish experiments you ever heard of in the trials; but as my system of tallying cross seedlings cannot err, and knowing Nature never does in these things, I must and at last did find out the thing, and I hope it will be useful to you. To me it is of more value, as confirming the possibility of the strongest pollen taking the lead on the stigma.