Breeder News

When Mark Jury travels he sees his life’s work everywhere he goes. Jury is a plant breeder and many of his plants have become staples of contemporary planting. There’s Phormium “Yellow Wave” in a London street; Cordyline “Red Fountain” in Italy; Daphne “Perfume Princess” in Melbourne and magnolias everywhere. In the garden world, Mark is most famous for his magnolias. In a lifetime of breeding them, he’s flowered hundreds and hundreds of seedlings and released just four plants – “Black Tulip”, “Felix”, “Burgundy Star” and “Honey Tulip”. Renowned plant breeder Mark Jury.Credit:Robin Powell If you’re considering a magnolia this winter, Jury hybrids will be top of your list. Either one of Jury’s, or one by bred by his father Felix, perhaps “Iolanthe”, “Apollo”, “Atlas” or “Vulcan”. The Jury garden, in Waitara, in the North Island of New Zealand, is a living museum of these two generations of work. The star attraction is the original “Iolanthe”, bred by Felix Jury in 1984, and a parent of many of the Jury magnolias. “Iolanthe” was one of a number of unflowered seedlings that Felix parked in the vegetable garden, waiting to see what would happen. It was so impressive from its first flowering that it stayed where it was, eventually shading out the vegetables. Each spring its lichened branches are covered in large, luminous, cup-shaped blooms, pale pink on the outside and white inside. Felix wanted to use “Iolanthe” to create a dark-flowered magnolia with those same cup-shaped blooms. He didn’t succeed, but Mark did, and named it “Felix” after his dad. “Felix” is a smaller, more upright plant than its mother with open flowers that are a brilliant hot pink in Australian gardens, a darker red in New Zealand. The strong, rich colour is the same on the inside and outside, which is Mark’s preference for magnolia flowers. Magnolia breeding is about the exchange of DNA through sexual reproduction. “You are aiming for something specific,” explains Mark. “The idea is to get plants that grow well and easily in a garden. And there are only a few of them. So you […]

Source: www.smh.com.au