Chamaerops humilis var. elatior

[Dimovi]

Does anyone have a Chamaerops humilis var. elatior or other non-clumping variety? I find sucker management a real pain. I am unable to find seeds or live plants online.

[Phoenikakias]

Seeds will by no means guarantee that resulted seedlings will turn out true to type or exact copies of their progenitors.

[Mandrew968]

Also, why fight the palm? How about match a species with what you desire-Trachycarpus might be a better choice for you and there are many to choose from. Best of all, its solitary.

[Pal Meir]

When 29 yr old:

 

And 4 yr young:

 

Gave it away in 2008 to https://www.weltvogelpark.de/.

[Fusca]

I had a solitary female Chamaerops humilis with about 4' of trunk when I lived in Houston.  It was flowering when I bought it and I grew a seedling from it thinking that it would be solitary as well.  It's planted in my yard here in San Antonio and is producing suckers.  There's an old thread here recommending application of kerosine to the cut suckers to prevent them from growing back but I'm not sure if it works.  Has anyone been successful with this?  I am considering trying myself.

[Dimovi]

8 hours ago, Mandrew968 said:

Also, why fight the palm? How about match a species with what you desire-Trachycarpus might be a better choice for you and there are many to choose from. Best of all, its solitary.

I have some Trachycartus, and they do OK here in Austin TX, but they don't thrive like the Mediterranean fan palm. The dry 100+ degree days here are perfect for Mediterranean palms like Chamaerops humilis and Phoenix dactylifera.

[Dimovi]

@Phoenikakias I thought elatior was a variety. I understand a variety to mean it is hereditary and not just individual variance.

[Dimovi]

3 hours ago, Fusca said:

I had a solitary female Chamaerops humilis with about 4' of trunk when I lived in Houston.  It was flowering when I bought it and I grew a seedling from it thinking that it would be solitary as well.  It's planted in my yard here in San Antonio and is producing suckers.  There's an old thread here recommending application of kerosine to the cut suckers to prevent them from growing back but I'm not sure if it works.  Has anyone been successful with this?  I am considering trying myself.

Perhaps your plant was fertilized by a clumping male and your seedling is a mutt. In mutts you can see traits from either parent or they can show up in the offspring of your seedling.

I would try pollinating the mother plant with one of its own seedlings once they start to flower.

[Fusca]

3 minutes ago, Dimovi said:

Perhaps your plant was fertilized by a clumping male and your seedling is a mutt. In mutts you can see traits from either parent or they can show up in the offspring of your seedling.

I would try pollinating the mother plant with one of its own seedlings once they start to flower.

No doubt it was fertilized by a clumping male - that was my point in agreement with Konstantinos that you can't rely on seeds from a solitary type yielding another solitary type.

[Dimovi]

1 minute ago, Fusca said:

No doubt it was fertilized by a clumping male - that was my point in agreement with Konstantinos that you can't rely on seeds from a solitary type yielding another solitary type.

That is always the case when mixing varieties with dioecious plants. You should, however, be able to get a single trunk male to pollinate with and get reliably single trunk offspring.

If you can't find one you may be able to fertilize the mother with its offspring and you should get about 50% of recessive traits show up in the second offspring. I assume clumping is a dominant trait since it is expressed in your seedling and that is a more conservative guess.

So, I am deducing that your original plant has rr genotype (since it is single trunk), the clumping seedling has Rr genotype (has both genes but clumping is dominant). So if you cross the first offspring with the mother you should get 50% Rr (clumping) and 50% rr (solitary).

From there you can pollinate the single trunk females with single trunk males and get 100% single trunk offspring.

Yeah, that would be a long term project

[Fusca]

9 minutes ago, Dimovi said:

That is always the case when mixing varieties with dioecious plants. You should, however, be able to get a single trunk male to pollinate with and get reliably single trunk offspring.

If you can't find one you may be able to fertilize the mother with its offspring and you should get about 50% of recessive traits show up in the second offspring. I assume clumping is a dominant trait since it is expressed in your seedling and that is a more conservative guess.

So, I am deducing that your original plant has rr genotype (since it is single trunk), the clumping seedling has Rr genotype (has both genes but clumping is dominant). So if you cross the first offspring with the mother you should get 50% Rr (clumping) and 50% rr (solitary).

From there you can pollinate the single trunk females with single trunk males and get 100% single trunk offspring.

Yeah, that would be a long term project

That's interesting - hadn't thought about that!  A couple years ago I collected some seeds from a Chamaerops var argentea in a nursery thinking that I'd get another argentea.  At the time I wasn't thinking that I was collecting from a dioecious palm.  It didn't really occur to me until after the seeds germinated and the seedlings were green.  I more than likely got seeds pollinated by a green male but I don't know if pure argentea seedlings start out green and turn blue as they mature.  I guess I'll find out in some years but I'm not holding my breath...

[Darold Petty]

I have a solitary male, but I have no experience in trying to collect pollen.  Advice appreciated. 

Fusca do you still have the solitary female, or only its suckering offspring ? Perhaps we can establish a romance with a solitary female!

  I have also heard as anecdote that the single trunked form is more common in Algeria.  Any corroboration to this ?

[Fusca]

4 minutes ago, Darold Petty said:

Fusca do you still have the solitary female, or only its suckering offspring ?

Hi Darold,

I left the solitary female in the ground when I sold the house so I only have the suckering offspring.  Wish I had held on to it so we could do some match-making! 

Jon

[Pal Meir]

I had the same problem with my female Chamaerops »arborescens«: The male Chamaerops I owned was clumping.

[Darold Petty]

Fusca, Thanks for the response,    Anyone else with a solitary female plant ??

[Dimovi]

This could be an interesting long term research.

I don't really know if solitary trunk phenotype in Chamaerops humilis is as a result of a mutation in a single gene or different single trunk varieties have different mutations.

It is possible that single trunk phenotype is shared among all single trunking Chamaerops humilis, in that case single trunk female and single trunk male will guarantee 100% single trunk offspring.

Since I can't be sure, you guys can do independent breeding without necessarily using single trunk plants as long you know they are F1 offspring of a solitary trunk parent (F2 works too but the chance of single trunk allele is half so you would need to plant lots of seeds to be sure)

@Fusca if you have one female F1 and one male F1, even though they are both clumping, they should produce seeds, 25% of which are pure single trunk.

@Darold Petty you can do the same by fertilizing some clumping female with your solitary male and produce F1 clumping offspring and after 5 years you can breed the F1s to get 25% single trunk. You could also pollinate F1 female with P male and get 50% single trunk offspring, but that would result in slightly lower genetic variation.

Once you have single trunk female and single trunk male you can pollinate them and produce reliably 100% single trunk seeds (assuming no accidental pollination from other males).

Here is what I imagine you guys have available for breeding (where r is recessive solitary allele and R is dominant clumping allele):

P: RR or less likely Rr - any random clumping plant
P: rr - @Darold Petty male single trunk
F1: Rr - @Fusca clumping offspring with recessive solitary allele 

the goal is to get rr female and rr male

 

Edited July 15, 2020 by Dimovi

[Phoenikakias]

22 hours ago, Darold Petty said:

Fusca, Thanks for the response,    Anyone else with a solitary female plant ??

I have one that is a cross between a super clumping cerifera and a weakly suckering gracile form. It has produced up to now only one offshoot which was removed and ever since has been remaining solitary. This is about a decade long. Can it be considered solitary? Oh, it is also female.

[Phoenikakias]

It is known that if you cross two vulcano cultivars, you get only 25% of resulted offspring true to type of parents. Not sure if this information is relevant in current context, I felt though that I had to mention it.

[Phoenikakias]

18 hours ago, Phoenikakias said:

I have one that is a cross between a super clumping cerifera and a weakly suckering gracile form. It has produced up to now only one offshoot which was removed and ever since has been remaining solitary. This is about a decade long. Can it be considered solitary? Oh, it is also female.

My sort of solitary cross

[Phoenikakias]

And its parents

[Dimovi]

@Phoenikakias it may be that the single trunking allele is partially masked resulting in a weak clumping plant. Most of inheritance stuff taught in high school assumes complete dominance for heterozygous inheritance like Mendel's experiment with pea plants. Today we know things are a lot more complicated and not so black and white in all cases.

Here is a good article to read about allele expression.

https://www.thoughtco.com/heterozygous-definition-373468

https://www.thoughtco.com/phenotype-373475

I can't imagine there is much research done into finding out what causes clumping, but by learning the basics and doing some breeding and analyzing offspring you may be able to know what gene type causes single trunk. The same can be done with any kind of single gene mutation in any plant to isolate a trait and create a variety.

[Pal Meir]

Even my non-clumping Chamaerops (*1980) had one (and only this one) tiny offshoot:

[Phoenikakias]

15 hours ago, Pal Meir said:

Even my non-clumping Chamaerops (*1980) had one (and only this one) tiny offshoot:

Tried ever to cut it off, to see whether it would resprout?

[Pal Meir]

After a severe winter it had lost all fronds, so that I had to cut it down. Here the result during the following summer:

[Advective]

I am also interested in a non-clumping C. Humilis for potential outdoor potted use.

Has anyone removed any and all offshoots that appear on a clumping form, and does the palm eventually give up on trying to form new ones?

[Dimovi]

1 hour ago, Advective said:

I am also interested in a non-clumping C. Humilis for potential outdoor potted use.

Has anyone removed any and all offshoots that appear on a clumping form, and does the palm eventually give up on trying to form new ones?

I've seen people cutting them constantly just to have more come up untill you have a massive ball of growth at the base. I don't think they ever give up.

[Advective]

48 minutes ago, Dimovi said:

I've seen people cutting them constantly just to have more come up untill you have a massive ball of growth at the base. I don't think they ever give up.

Good to know, but that is awful. Crossing that palm off the list...

[Austinpalm]

I have a previously multi-trunked Chamaerops in my yard that the previous owner pruned back to the main trunk.  It appears to have only had 1 trunk for many years now.  The old trimmed trunks have started to rot away from the main trunk.  I would like to get some new trunks to sprout.  Any thoughts on how to induce the growth of new trunks or suckers?