Credit where credit is due

Primulina (Chirita) 'Chastity', Green Spring Gardens conservatory

As an amateur plant breeder, I appreciated these comments by Kelly Norris as quoted by Allan Armitage in a recent article about the future of plant breeding in Greenhouse Grower magazine, Today's Breeders on Tomorrow's Plants:

"There are those coming of out graduate school who end up toiling away with petunias and commodity crops. I feel for them," he says.  "Then there are those of us in 'private practice' (a.k.a. unpaid hobby breeding) or working for public institutions that don't have to live by the rules.  We take risks, run into road blocks (like lack of funding or time) and fail more than we succeed.  But we are passionate and believe in what we encounter in the public — an earnest desire to be fascinated by plants and to want something different than what they so often encounter.  It's this class of breeders that stand the chance of advancing the cause of plant breeding because they are champions of new genera."

This kind of credit is too rarely given to amateur or hobbyist plant breeders.  I've been breeding plants since the 1980s (1970s if you count my high school dabblings with African violets!), first with gesneriads and now begonias.  I've had some modest success: my gesneriad hybrids are being grown worldwide and are listed in many mail-order catalogs (Kartuz Greenhouses, Logee's, Lyndon Lyon Greenhouses, The Violet Barn, Lauray of Salisbury, Dibleys Nurseries, to name a few).  I've even stumbled upon one of my plants, Chirita (now Primulina) 'Chastity', being propagated in quantity in a wholesale nursery in southern Florida, labeled only as "Purple Chirta" (sic).  Yet I receive no financial rewards for my work; I trade or give away my plants to fellow gardeners and sometimes directly to commercial growers, who are then free to propagate and sell those plants as they see fit.

The sad truth is that with obscure or specialty plants with limited markets like gesneriads there just isn't much money to be made on them, and protection methods like patenting simply aren't cost-effective.  I could attempt to propagate and sell the plants myself (for example on Ebay, as many growers now do) but I don't have sufficient growing space in my small urban house; my breeding programs already take up all my available space and I don't have room to propagate any one cultivar in quantity.

Since recognition is the only reward I receive, I greatly appreciate it when I'm identified by name in online or print catalogs as the person who created or introduced the plant.  Some commercial growers are better at this than others.  This has always given me an incentive to provide my plants to those commercial growers who will give me recognition as the originator of the plant.  This is one reason why I like Tony Avent's famous Plant Delights Nursery catalog so much: he tells a story about each plant, including exactly where it came from and who was involved.  It's a major reason why I aspire to have some of my plants listed in his catalog, and have provided Tony with some of my plants that I think merit and deserve a wider market, even if they will never be particularly profitable.

That said, there are some less-tangible benefits to being a hobbyist breeder.  It helps put me in touch with other growers who can provide rare, unusual, or new plants that I can use as breeding stock—often in trade for some of my own but sometimes people simply give me plants.  I'm often overwhelmed by the sheer generosity of my fellow gardeners!  I experienced this when I visited one commercial grower, well over 20 years ago when I was young and poor and just starting out as a plant breeder, and the owner refused to take money for any of the gesneriads I had picked out because she wanted to support my hybridizing efforts.

As I work with the genus Seemannia, a gesneriad I believe has commercial potential, and especially with begonias—a group with much better name recognition than most gesneriads, and with a much larger commercial market—I intend to move away from being strictly an amateur to a more professional model.  I hope to attend the Independent Plant Breeders Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan later this year, where I will meet fellow breeders as well as commercial growers who may be interested in marketing the results of our work.  After nearly 30 years of breeding plants strictly as a hobbyist, this will definitely be a new chapter in my life!

I think hobbyist plant breeders will always have a place: as Kelly pointed out, it's the hobbyists who are working with unusual genera and species that the professional breeders aren't interested in (i.e., don't find sufficiently profitable), and generate a lot of the novelty outside of the mass-marketed plants like petunias. Moreover, the new cultivars we hobbyists produce are generally not protected by patents or in any other way, so anybody can propagate, market and sell them.  That's pretty darn cost-effective for the commercial growers but this is the downside for us hobbyists.  We get no money and little credit for the work we do, and it's why I would encourage commercial growers to give credit to the breeders in their catalogs because this is often all the reward we get.