RESULTS REGARDING THE PERFORMANCES OF GLADIOLUS HYBRIDS ON THEIR PARENTS

Abstract

Testing the performances of hybrids compared to their parents is an important operation justified by the purpose of the breeding work. The main goal of the breeding work is to obtain bigger flowers, nicer colours, higher plants, practically, the new plant must be better than all the existing ones, but, for the landscape design this purposes may not be the same because, in the case of gladioli, we already have tall and very tall plants. Therefore, for this purpose smaller plants with different colours and compact inflorescences are needed. The experiments were conducted in 2013 in the experimental field from The Agrobotanical Garden at UASVM Cluj-Napoca. The data collected were used to calculate the hybrid vigour, the difference from the average value of parents and to the best parent in each of the six quantitative characters taken into account: plant height, flower stem length, inflorescence length, number of leaves, number of flowers in the inflorescence and flower diameter, and the results were included in the synthesis tables. The results show that two hybrid combinations are reaching reach bigger heights then their parents meaning that only one hybrid combination exceeds the height of the best parent, negative differences were registered on inflorescence length and the no. of flowers. The diameter of flowers varies between 10.1 cm (H9) and 16.3 cm (H18) registering negative differences compared to their genitors. Â