BEYOND THE HIVE
Opposite: Most garden plants are bred to appeal to humans, but pollinators make different choices, often preferring small, non-descript blooms. Above left: Plant breeders may pollinate by hand and keep meticulous records of both the male and female parent plants. Above right: Native plant salvage is a good way to collect wild plants before they are destroyed by development. Only certain ones will readily transplant, but saving even some may be worth the effort.
that amplify the desired traits and suppress the annoying ones. Traditional selective breeding occurs when a plant breeder raises many plants of a single species and selects those individuals that have characteristics the breeder seeks. For example, as an undergraduate student, I worked for a plant breeder who was searching for alfalfa with a higher than average protein content. We would grow many types of alfalfa in research plots,
harvest it in the normal manner, and then perform laboratory spring, we would grow seeds from the best producers in my job! Yes, I got my start in pollination ecology as a bee impersonator. Who knew? One by one, I would collect pollen from the anthers of
little label around each one. Each plant had a number, and I Then I would wash my hands in Lysol and prepare for the next cross. The goal of this research was to produce enriched alfalfa
cultivars for dairy cows. It was a painstaking and tedious process, but as a cash-strapped student, I was happy to have the work, even if hundreds of Lysol baths per day ruined my hands. Today, modern plant breeding incorporates an array of
biology. These new tools aid with gene cloning, gene editing, and marker-assisted selections, but the principles of plant breeding remain the same.
italic. For example, you might see a variety of alfalfa labeled
Medicago sativa followed by the cultivar name. The registrant can sell his product under the protected name and prevent others from doing so.
The Origin of Native Plants Many of the cultivars for sale these days were bred from some for centuries. For the most part, these plants are readily familiar to us. Corn, apples, roses, and turf grasses are all sold as registered cultivars. But when gardeners wanted to plant native plants for
pollinators, a dilemma arose. How could a seller get enough wanted to buy them? And from a marketing point of view, how could the breeder make his plants stand apart from the
that were harvested from plots of land that were scheduled to be cleared and developed. Native plant salvage was popular here in western Washington, where trained volunteers went into the tracts before the bulldozers and dug any plants they thought might survive the transplant process. The plants were sold by the county and the money was used for other conservation projects. I still have some wild ginger growing at home that was salvaged during that time, as well as some snowberry and cascara, two dependable pollinator plants. Other groups, such as the Seed Savers Exchange, collected seeds from wildland plants that could be grown for restoration projects. The seeds were cultivated in greenhouses and then transplanted to selected projects.
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