- Shirley Poppy
Shirley Poppy is the name given to an ornamental
cultivar group derived from the European wild field poppy ("Papaver rhoeas ").History
The Shirley poppy was created from 1880 onwards by the Reverend William Wilks, vicar of the parish of Shirley in England. Wilks found in a corner of his garden where it adjoined arable fields, a variant of the field poppy that had a narrow white border around the petals. By careful selection and hybridization over many years he obtained a strain of poppies ranging in colour from white and pale lilac to pink and red, and unlike the wild poppies these had no dark blotches at the base of the petals. Further selection has given rise to semi-double and double forms, as well as flowers with a ring of contrasting colour around the edge: the
picotee form.Genetics of Shirley Poppies
The striking example of deviation from a wild type under artificial selection provided by the Shirley poppy attracted the attention of pioneer geneticists and biometricians. The famous biometrician
Karl Pearson used the Shirley poppy to study his ideas ofhomotyposis , which he defined as “the quantitative degree of resemblance to be found on the average between the like parts of organisms” [Pearson, Karl et al. (1903) Cooperative investigations on plants. I. On the inheritance of the Shirley poppy. Biometrika 2: 56-100] [Pearson, Karl et al. (1906) Cooperative Investigations on Plants: III. On inheritance in the Shirley poppy: Second Memoir. Biometrika 4: 394-426] . However Pearson's work on Shirley poppy was ridiculed by the pioneer geneticistWilliam Bateson for ignoring the recently discovered analytical methods of Mendelian genetics. Bateson wrote: "Misconception of the nature and significance of intermediates has deprived the work of the biometrical school of scientific value as a contribution to the study of heredity. This is well seen in the case of the colours of the Shirley Poppies, one of the subjects with reference to which copious statistics have been amassed and published" [ William Bateson (1909) Mendel's Principles of Heredity. Cambridge University Press.] . The rancorous debate between genetics and biometrics, in which the Shirley poppy became embroiled, was only resolved through the work ofRonald Fisher who showed that the two schools of thought were actually compatible.References
External links
* [http://www.bulbnrose.com/Heredity/Burbank/shirleys.html Luther Burbank on Shirley Poppies]
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