Citrus > Cold Hardy Citrus

Polyfoliate Swingle Citrumelo

(1/1)

cascadiacitrus:
I received some swingle seeds from Avery, TheMulberries back in early April. When I noticed a leaf had extra leaflets I messaged him asking about it and he said that can sometimes happen in these hybrid seedlings.

However, this one is different. On this one seedling 8/19 are polyfoliate instead of trifoliate, The last 7 of the new flush are all polyfoliate.

They are a mix of quadrifoliate (4 leaflets) and pentafoliate (5 leaflets). I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see if the trend continues. It’s a more compact seedling than some of my others.

Here’s a few images of some of my swingle seedlings. It’s the one on the left and the first one in the series of photos taken from the top.












Here are some photos of the leaves.

mikkel:
If this mutation proves to be stable, it would really be great. Normally, most breeders aim to move away from trifoliate traits toward monofoliate ones, but to me a polyfoliate leaf also has its own appeal.
Perhaps it could be useful to preserve the polyfoliate sections by grafting them as separate plants? Just as a hypothesis: if the polyfoliation were limited to a single bud, further cultivation of that specific bud might allow the trait to be reinforced. The mother plant, on the other hand, might eventually produce normal buds again and lose the characteristic.
But as I said, this is just a hypothesis without knowing the deeper background.

caladri:
It's not wildly unusual to see young citrus not know how to leaf and make weird leaves of all sorts. If it's stable, that'd be cool!

Also, great to see more island folks here :)

cascadiacitrus:
Yes good to see more island folk!

Navigation

[0] Message Index