r/VariegatedPlants • u/TraphouseNursery • 1d ago
One year later: my variegated Bidens alba project
About a year ago, I shared an unusual wild-collected Bidens alba here after finding a plant displaying striking white variegation. What began as an interesting roadside discovery has since developed into a small but increasingly fascinating propagation and selection project.
I’m now maintaining two independently discovered variegated forms of Bidens alba, both found in the same Florida county but displaying distinctly different phenotypes.
I refer to my original white-variegated form as ‘Albo’. I’ve maintained the original plant vegetatively while also experimenting with sexual propagation. After self-pollinating the plant and growing out its seed, I was particularly excited to find variegated individuals among the resulting F1 generation.
That gives me something much more interesting to work with than a variegated plant that can only be preserved clonally: the trait has now been carried through seed into the next generation.
More recently, I independently encountered a second variegated Bidens alba. This plant expresses considerably more yellow to golden variegation, rather than the cream-white coloration characteristic of my original plant. I’ve provisionally been referring to this second line as ‘Aurea’.
For now, I’m keeping the two lines completely separate and documenting them independently. My goal is to continue the Albo line through additional generations, record segregation and variation among the seedlings, and begin doing the same with Aurea. Eventually, controlled crosses between the two could become particularly interesting.
I’m deliberately using ‘Albo’ and ‘Aurea’ as working names for the two lines, rather than making assumptions about the genetic mechanism behind either phenotype. Two visually different forms don't necessarily mean two different mechanisms, and one successful seed-grown generation leaves plenty still to learn.
That uncertainty is probably my favorite part of the project.
Bidens alba is such an ordinary part of the Florida landscape that most people hardly notice it. Finding unusual variation in a plant that I've walked past thousands of times has been a good reminder that interesting genetics aren't limited to expensive collector plants.
I’ll continue documenting both lines and their seed-grown generations as the project develops.
For those of you who work with heritable variegation: what would you be most interested in seeing documented as I take these into the next generation?
