SYNGONIUM PODOPHYLLUM 'PINK ALLUSION'
ORIGIN:
Bob Donaldson, Donaldson Greenhouses, 1986; produced by Agri-Starts, Inc., Apopka, Florida
CULTIVAR DESCRIPTION:
Overall green to olive green with a white overlay and prominent pink veins, branching well at the base and otherwise growing like 'White Butterfly'.¹ Intermediate habit and coarse leaves in the 1993 trial, the color recorded as green and olive-green with red veins.³
NOTES:
1. The first of the Allusion series, discovered in 1986 by Bob Donaldson of Donaldson Greenhouses and now produced by Agri-Starts of Apopka, Florida, whose trademark the series name is.¹
2. Selected from 'White Butterfly' in tissue culture. Organogenesis from 'Pink Allusion' yielded 13 further cultivars, its self-pollination gave 'Regina Red Allusion', and tissue culture of that plant released five more.⁴
3. Ted Held used it as the test plant in his 2010 Aroideana article on bringing simple experiments into horticultural practice.⁵
4. Unconfirmed: In young tissue-culture plants the blade is very wide, greenish white to lime along the main veins, with some white spotting between them.² Its tetraploid derivatives include 'Bob Allusion' and 'Bold Allusion'.²
STORY:
STORY TITLE: Where the pink came from
Every pink-veined arrowhead in the trade goes back to one plant that Bob Donaldson of Donaldson Greenhouses picked out of a batch of tissue-cultured 'White Butterfly' in 1986. The parent had never shown a trace of pink. The variant kept the white overlay and the branching habit of 'White Butterfly' and added pink veins, and Agri-Starts of Apopka, Florida, took it up as the first of a trademarked Allusion series.¹ The name proved apt. Put back into tissue culture, 'Pink Allusion' kept producing variants of its own, and by 2006 thirteen more cultivars had been selected from it, along with 'Regina Red Allusion' from its self-pollinated seed and five further cultivars from that plant's tissue culture.⁴
When Chen and colleagues fingerprinted the family that year they found what the pedigree implied: within each group the plants were all but identical at the DNA level, and half of them could not be separated by AFLP markers at all. The colors that make the series sell are the products of somaclonal variation, changes small enough to hide from a genetic fingerprint yet stable enough to hold through a decade of propagation.⁴
REFERENCES:
1. Agri-Starts, Inc., Apopka, Florida — Syngonium 'Pink Allusion'
5. Held, T. 2010. Employing a little science in horticultural practice. Aroideana 33: 241–248
Photo by Agri-Starts, Inc., Apopka, Florida
Photos by Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Additional photos by Yercaud-elango (CC BY-SA 4.0)
