Quote:
Originally Posted by joseph
Always yes. But from a practical standpoint, plants that have been inbred for long enough to be considered heirlooms (50 generations?) are functionally clones even if there is some minor variation between plants.
In my world view, by the time that you have done enough generations of inbreeding to call a plant an heirloom (or merely stable) it is already too inbred.
But all heirlooms are not created equal... This spring someone sent me seeds from a "Croatian Brandywine". Already at 5 weeks old there are two different types of plants with different shaped leaves. I don't have any way of knowing whether the plants are crossed, or if the variety has retained that much genetic diversity from the beginning. A note that accompanied the seed said "The bees were all over this last summer." When I look up "Croatian Brandywine" in Tatiana's tomato database, a variety by that name is described as regular leaved with 15% to 20% potato leaved. Since this is an individual's heirloom from the old country there is no way of knowing whether the variety's archetype would describe a population that is 25% potato leaved or whether this is due to an inadvertent cross pollination. If the variety is highly attractive to pollinators then ongoing crossing between regular-leaved/potato-leaved individuals might be part of the variety's archetype.
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Joseph, some back history about the two leaf forms of the Croatian Brandywine:
http://tomatoville.com/showthread.ph...ian+brandywine
And if you do a search here at Tville I think you'll find that apparently the Croatian Brandywine did not originate in Croatia and is not a Croatian heirloom . No doubt someone sent seeds for Brandywine to someone in Croatia and the person who offered it at that plant sale in CA named it Brandywine from Croatia, b'c that's where the seeds came from.
There are many of us who send seeds to persons in many countries and there are also many seed sites in many countries that sell tomato seeds from many countries, including the US/
Brandywine originated in the US.
Carolyn