Go sport fishing at your local nursery

Regular fishing, for actual fish, is quite possibly the second most boring think ever invented (First place, of course, goes without question to baseball) but sport fishing! Now THAT is something I can get behind.

By sport fishing I mean, of course, looking for sports – chance mutations – in plants. Sometimes a flower color changes, or sometimes a leaf becomes variegated, like on this lilac branch I found at a friend’s nursery a couple years ago

Nurseries are great places to go “fishing” for these sports, simply by walking down the rows of plants looking for anything odd or out of place. Sometimes they are true sports, and sometimes there has been some hanky panky… Last summer I was walking through a nursery looking at their pots of blooming Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus)

And suddenly I noticed a plant that was markedly different.

Way too different to just be a sport, this was a chance hybrid with… something. What, I don’t know, Dianthus is a big, promiscuous genus, but I like it and snatched it up. The chance hybrid was pretty enough and intriguing, and after blooming it produced a healthy crop of seeds, so I grew some out. One year later, they’re blooming in all sorts of interesting ways..

One looks just like a regular Sweet William, but significantly shorter

Another is a nice red, though the flowers are a bit sparse

And this one, my favorite, has decided to pretend to be a carnation with masses of double, fragrant flowers.

I, of course, have responded by collecting many many more seeds from that original chance hybrid picked up at the nursery, and can’t wait to sow them out and see what else may show itself.

So next time you at a big nursery, take some time to go fishing for sports and hybrids… you may just find something cool.

— Joseph Tychonievich