Flowers of the Future
Warning!!! The flowers in this section are NOT yet for sale. The flowers shown have been hybridized here at Cherry Creek and are now in the lengthy evaluation process. The flowers here may or may not be available for sale in five to ten years on average.
This section gives you a sense of the some of the kinds or styles or types of daffodils being bred here. The evaluation process that all my daffodil introductions undergo is lengthy, often times lasting a decade or more. At the end of the evaluation period the seedling has usually increased to somewhere around fifty bulbs total. At that time the seedling under number is either named or discarded. It may be another two to five years after naming before there is a large enough quantity to introduce and make available for sale.
We use the evaluation process to determine if a seedling of ours is "better" than that which already exists in the daffodil world. Usually I require that a seedling excel in multiple characteristics. The art of selecting and evaluating new seedlings presupposes that the person doing the evaluating knows intimately what already exists. This is most important in order to KNOW that the flower being evaluated is truly an advance over that which exists.
I have flowered over thirty thousand seed raised daffodils. I have named and introduced just over sixty and have a few hundred selected and in the pipeline for evaluation. This is a horribly poor overall percentage. The flip side of this is that anything named and introduced by has met exacting standards. It's probably a pretty good thing!
Hope you enjoy this section.
Steve
