Duboisia hopwoodii germination

[darcy]

Thanks to a member here I recently got some D. hopwoodii seeds from the WA side of the country. I've had my first germination today after 5 weeks. I'll post some more details on the methods i used and a pic later of the little fella.

[darcy]

[Rimbaud]

awesome.

well, good luck with the kudna mate

have you let the SAB forum folk know about this yet?

for those who aren't in the know, what darcy has accomplished is really significant. This is one hell of a hard plant to find in cultivation... if at all...

[darcy]

true kudna

[gerbil]

Very nice darcy

So what's your interest in kudna? Besides plant diversity and those sorts of things, is it to get an insight into it's chemical profile for more understanding of the chemotypes of D. hopwoodii? Do you have any pituringa pituri seedlings happening, photos?

I'm curious, how deep is you sand for the initial seed germination, i'd imagine you'd be ground planting or getting it into a very deep pot soon after seedling establishment?

Thanks very much for sharing Look forward to see how it works out.

[darcy]

hey Gerbil,

mainly how to propagate this species from seed and how to keep it alive. Sand is only bout 10cm deep, she should be fine up until the first few leaves.

[JumpedAngel]

Nice work Darcy!

The trick seems to be in keeping them alive

I now understand why the plantationers grafted them on to D.myoporoides rootstock, although this creates a new problem as I have been lead to understand that various chemical components for D. hopwoodii are actually manufactured in its root system.

how is the beastie dooing, is it still o.k.?

[darcy]

It's doing fine JA, just putting on it's first true leaves, i gather it was sending down a tap root before starting work up top.

I could only find the following info for germinating D. hopwoodii:

Duboisia hopwoodii, advise smoked water and/or gibberellic acid

I had luck with ca. 1000ppm GA3, it may need even higher concentrations.

[JumpedAngel]

That is really interesting

I've done 3 trips out there so far this season and am about to do the 4th

After the 1st trip (early Nov) I tried germinating about 70 seeds half/half with GA-3 @ 500ppm and 1000ppm with zero result, I didnt expect much of a result as the seed itself looked like it had been thru a pressure cooker after the treatment.

On my 3rd trip (late Jan) I again found some viable drupe and this time treated about 20 seeds each with a commercial native seed raising mix and boiling water, the boiling water worked with 2 seeds unfortunately I was unable to keep them alive for long despite bringing home a large volume of good red desert sand.

Oh well, maybe next season

[Rimbaud]

i thought ga-3 might do the trick let's see, it's worked for basically all the tricky ones i ever tried - sassafras (thank you, ga-3), tasmannia species (thank you, ga-3), mandrake (100% germ rate, vastly superior to any recorded germ rates i have ever read about anywhere for a. mandragora... thanks ga-3),various others...

if it was me JA i'd soak em for a week in 2000ppm or even higher... what's the best/worst result? couldnt be any worse than zero germs... worst case, you get a few germinations, and something goes haywire with the initial growth of the seedlings and they start sprouting kangaroo heads and lizard bellies and camel humps along with the first leaves... nothing a bit of time wont mend

[Rimbaud]

p.s. the rumour in northern sydney, that i heard about on the trains on the way to work (and via hushed whispers in the hair salons and chinese eateries), is that you can raise certin poppy species at near 100% germ rate in 24 hours with ga-3 too. And i swear, i dont even own shares in ga-3..

[JumpedAngel]

Wow! that much ay!, dont worry bro I'm not upset, its just an ongoing drama, something like my ex-wife

I thought I had over cooked them at 2 days, as I already said they looked over cooked.

In any case this is now a 25 or so years journey for me so I'm not exactly impatient about it. I don't anticipate that I will find ripe drupe out there again this season as drupe are mostly around in Nov. There are other things that I'm gearing up to try for probobly later on this year, I was actually surprised to find flowers and drupe on the bush late in Jan, so who knows...

This next trip for me will hopefully be about GPSing a few more locations, I did at least a hundred click on foot so far this season and as always before it was only on the last day that I ran across the payload. I know of at least another 30 plants I've run across out there before but in the past I've been a bit of a purist in insisting that I want to navigate only by the sun, O.K. I admit it, Gps saves a lot of stuffing around, lately I've been doing some grid pattern searching and have located new colonies in an area that I've finally relocated and believe that some of the old colonies might be found out where I've most recently been searching.

Just out of interest, I think I found the grand-daddy of all plants in the new colony, I have to confirm it but I think that it is responsible for runners possibly a more than a kilometre away, its main branch (now dead is some 8 or 9 inches in diameter and its two living branches are 6 to 7 inches in diameter, I want to collect a section of its dead trunk and see if i can read its rings, however being a timber collector also I wouldn't mind getting some small ornament turned out of that dead trunk.

Other than that there are other germination aides I have read about and may have to try, ABA (Abscisic Acid), Cytokinins, Ethylene and Potassium Nitrate even Thiourea has some merrit but really I'm willing to give GA-3 another go, I was going to try it again anyway but in a lower conc.

The other thing I've been thinking about it Temp, having had a weather station out there a few times now, I've been surprised to see that surface temps for the sand can exceed 60 C, There is also a huge Thermal mass involved and it will not surprise me too much if it turns out that there is a minimum overnight Temp requirement so I think I might end up investing in a heat matt.

[JumpedAngel]

Appologies first, I'm now beginning to doubt that the two germinations that I claimed I had some weeks ago (hot water germination) were actually D.hopwoodii as they did not look like the image below. I barely got a look at them then had to go off on the job for a week, by the time I got back there was nothing worth looking at. All I can say is that I might have forgotten to sterilize the red sand that I brought home with me.

It seems my luck changed today as there are two new puppies for me to play with, the image below shows one of them, the inset on the right is the image of a seed that I took some years ago, the texture of the seed case still on the Plumule is evidence of its identity.

Vital stats are:-
Treated in GA-3 for 2 days at 1000 ppm
Placed on surface of sterile cactus mix
Covered with 2 mm of fine sharp sand
Kept in a Tupperware container on an East facing windowsill
(as per typical cactus germination setup)
Germination time : 19 weeks
So far 2/35 seeds germinated

As for the seed itself, this is not going to be an accurate germination trial as only about 10% of the seed planted could be said to have been sourced from 'mature' drupe (it was too early in the season).



hmmmmm... image doesnt seem to work....
well its on the Photo Gallary anyway

[Rimbaud]

awesome JA!!!

[Rimbaud]

p.s. i fixed up yer pic link too nice photos!