If you have been reading this blog you are probably aware of my efforts to take bloom stalks of Mauna Loa that exhibited flowers with more then 5 petals and produce more plants that have a higher percentage of petals greater the 5. For the most part I have had minimal success and came to the conclusion that one may do this with color but it did not work with this trait. I may have to revise that stance. Another Mauna Loa (the one with 7 petals that I cultured the bloom stalk) bloomed. What I observed was that the first 20 blooms had 5 blooms that had 5 petals; 12 blooms that had 6 petals and 3 that had 7 or more petals. So of 20 blooms 75% had 6 or more petals. Now the problem with this experiment is that I lost the control plant. It died. That is the old Mauna Loa that I did not propagate, had mostly 5 petal blooms. I would only occasionally see a 6 petal bloom but had not quantify the percentage of 5 blooms which I would say was at least 80%. So I have no good way of doing an honest comparison. Should any reader have a Mauna Loa plant and would be willing to share the number of petals counts for a couple of bloom cycles (and photographs), I would be willing to trade one of my 6+ petal Mauna Loa plants for that information.
I apologize for the lack of image focus and quality of color on the above image. But my focus (no pun intended) was the fact that the number of petals exceeded 6, actually it was 8 on this bloom. This bloom had 8 petals plus 2 undeveloped petals that appears to be petals which are morphologically derived from stamens. This is starting to get interesting.
