Environmental Conditioning of Flax

Abstract

EXPERIMENTS carried out over a number of years have shown that remarkably large differences can be produced in the weight of flax plants as a result of the effect of the environment on previous generations of plants. In one experiment, all eight combinations of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer treatments were applied to forty plants of an inbred, self-fertilizing variety in the damp, dull season of 1954. The progeny, which were grown under a uniform set of fertilizer treatments, were cut at ground-level at maturity and weighed. The differences in the weights of the progeny (C 1 1955) due to the parental treatments are shown in Table 1. Some types are as much as two and three times the weights of others and, with the exception of the nitrogen plot, they are closely correlated with the weights produced by applying the fertilizers directly to the plants (Table 1, C 0 1955).