Jungfrau ´Dos Pueblos´and an opportunity lost.

[MrCym]

I don´t want anyone to think I´ve got too much time on my hands! Today I potted up hundreds of plugs which apart from additional culling, is a fairly mindless task so I recalled an encounter with Jungfrau ´Dos Pueblos´. About 30 years ago, I visited Peter Moffat at Moffat Orchids in New Zealand. He showed me a recent re-cloning of Jungfrau ´Dos Pueblos´which had thrown a hexaploid with six blooms as I recall. If I had only known then what I know now, I would have grabbed it!

Let´s examine Jungfrau ´Dos Pueblos´. It was Grand Champion of the Santa Barbara Show in 1958, gaining both an AM and a Silver Medal from the CSA. Henry Tanaka told me the story how the workers cut the first spike and brought it to the packing area. Everyone was amazed at the flower so Henry went back to try and match the stem in his hand with a plant. The seedlings were all grown in raised ground beds at that time. He made a match and noticed a second spike developing. The plant was lifted, placed in a pot and showed at SB where it got the awards. The spray was then cut and sent to the RHS where it gained another AM.

Right from the start, real serious Cym folk doubted the pedigree! Eagle, the supposed pollen parent tended to have dotted lips in its offspring. The original Jungfrau was registered by the great Alexander, many years earlier. I have all the old Dos Pueblos catalogs so tonight I decided to do some research. It´s easy to knock out all the tetraploid possibilities as JDP is clearly a triploid. But sadly, I have had to knock out all the triploid possibilities from that era too! So just maybe, the doubters were wrong and JDP is indeed the wonderful combination of Alexanderi ´Westonbirt´and pollen from a diploid Eagle??? Had I known about hexaploid breeding back in the 1990´s I would have been loading Peter´s plant up with long-spiked diploid pollen.

JDP was an amazingly productive plant but it fell from favor largely because its flowers didn´t last well when cut. Today, I can say I never see it in any collections. Many Dutch growers got burned with JDP when customers complained about poor shelf life.