@Wildbloomers great tutorial and clear illustrations for those able and willing to hand pollinate their desert roses. I copied your tutorial here so it will not get buried with all the comments.

https://garden.org/thread/view...

Wildbloomers said:@Kaktus. Don't give up on hand pollination. The reason for failure can be many things. Maybe the plant is not receptive at the time, two or three days from opening usually works. Maybe the pollen is too old, it should be almost granular but slightly sticky. Maybe the pollen was not applied to the proper part of the stigma (the main reason for failure).
Possibly small insects have eaten the pollen and stigmatic surface after the pollination. I once took a flower that I accidentally knocked off a plant and opened it to get the pollen only to find tiny worms crawling in the pollen.
These pics may be helpful.

Standard flower


Flower with two petals and corresponding tube removed. The fuzzy pink parts are the anther tails and serve no purpose in hand pollination. (Interesting side note, in some multi-petaled plants these have developed into petals so when you open the flower they will be missing). The fuzzy white cone with the slits in it contains and protects the pollen and the stigma. The pollinators take pollen from the top slits and deposit it into the bottom ones.


In this picture I have removed three of the anther tails down to the top of the stigma (which is not receptive so any pollen that falls on it doesn't pollinate the plant, nature's way of forcing outcrossing). The toothpick is touching the area that has the pollen, the top half of the fuzzy white cone.


In this pic you can see that the pollen is brown and crumbly looking, probably no longer viable. It should be greenish yellow to straw brown in color. The toothpick points to the area that houses the receptive portion of the stigma.



Here I have pushed the toothpick through one slit and out another. This is where our friendly bees put the pollen.


Here I have removed a section of the cone to expose the stigma (the shiny part) and the tube leading down to the ovary


The toothpick is pointing to the receptive part of the stigma, the bottom side not the top. Imagine our little insect looking for nectar puts it's face or feet or proboscis into the closest slit to the flower face and finds none. Not to be deterred our intrepid creature, now sullied with pollen pushes on to the deeper slit and when it leaves/backs out it pulls its appendages back through the deeper slit thereby depositing pollen on the underside of the stigma and, assuming the plants are compatible, pollination has been accomplished. Kaktus, be the bee!

Where it states "place pollens here" those are like "slits" where you can place the pollens and brush/spread the pollens upwards using the toothpick following the directions of the arrows.

Wildbloomers said:
I just went outside and cut away some petals to show the anther tails.


And indeed there was what appears to be viable pollen so I "selfed" this flower. It was an older flower but the pollen still looks promising. Some plants are self infertile but I'll hope for the best.

@Wildbloomers, would love to see updates of your yellow and peach seedpod on this thread too.

Well done Gigi. Very informative post regarding pollination. Thank you Wildbloomers

Yeahhh... Finally.. it is the THE DAY for hand pollination... Taken 6 plants with flowers, I will cross pollinate them.. start to cut the first and second Flowers..


Oops.. they are different from the book
The 3rd flower, the shape is right, but no pollen take a side..
Cut the 4th and 5th flower, finally can see some pollen in there, use a toothpick to take the pollens and put them in the 3,4,5
The wind is quite strong, I have a bad eyesight, the hand also shaking, not very sure on what I did to the flowers
Cut the 6th flower, the shape is right but no pollen again, just pretend that it has pollen and do the same magic toothpick on it, the same applied on the first 2 flowers, just stick the toothpick inside them..

I think I have created enough damages for today.. hopefully I can see some seedpod in early October.
And I believe I have made my statement clear to them : " please produce some double petalled seedpod for me, or I will repeat this process until I get what I want"

Nice try TJoe! Keep us posted!

Without cross pollination , is the hand pollination succesful ? Or adeniums can't pollinate themselves

Well tried kaktus

Not sure if these are what we expect to see, 2 of them have these, the others dries out already
The first one has 3 section, the 2nd one is one pair



And this deformed one should be an easy target for hand pollination, but there is no pollen there

Hope your seedpods will grow.

I have some that size with no plans of growing. Next thing I know they are gone and just fall off.

@Kaktus any update on your seedpods from your pollination?

Another great article I read online.

https://adeniumlove.wordpress....

GigiPlumeria said:@Kaktus any update on your seedpods from your pollination?

No Seedpods
Will try again some other time..

This came from this chat:

The thread "grafting desert rose plant to obtain a three petal bloom" in Adeniums forum

Wildbloomers said:@GigiPlumeria and @RobertFJameson.
Sorry that I didn't get to this sooner, but too much going on.
As the consensus above indicates, multi petaled adenium are not produced by grafting, only reproduced. They are a genetic mutation and aren't produced by mechanical manipulation. The first attached article is quite old but does indicate how one could develop their own line of multi petaled flowers from seed. Essentially you take a single flower with color, shape, size that you like and use it as the seed parent. Then take a multi petal flower that has a good shape and use it as the pollen parent. The resulting progeny (according to the article) will be ~15% multi petaled the color of the seed parent, ~50% multi petaled the color of the pollen parent and the rest single petaled. If you then cross the 15% with its multi petaled siblings or parent you can start getting large numbers of multi petals the color of the original single petaled flower. Note that this takes a while because you have to grow the plants to blooming size and sexual maturity. This is why grafting is so popular.

https://www.siamadenium.com/ar...

The second article is a study of variability/heritability in Adenium and explains why this is a good method to produce the results that commercial hybridizers (not grafters) are looking for. It's a little technical but worth reading.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Wildbloomers said:

@GigiPlumeria. Of course you can re-post the info. Also, another tip for you is that the flower needs to be open a day or two before attempting to hand pollinate. It seems that either the pollen isn't ripe or the ovary isn't receptive when the flower first opens. At least that's how it appears to me.
And thanks for the nut prizes!

@Kaktus. This is the first time that I saw this thread, maybe this will help.
Above you said,

"Confused Oops.. they are different from the book Crying
The 3rd flower, the shape is right, but no pollen Blinking Sad take a side.."

The pictures of your dissected flowers show flowers that developed extra petals from/instead of the anther tails. Flowers like that often don't produce pollen. However the stigma is usually normal and can be receptive to pollen from another plant. Look for anther tails on your multi petal flowers. The ones with anther tails usually have pollen and will carry the multi petal trait.

I just went outside and cut away some petals to show the anther tails.


And indeed there was what appears to be viable pollen so I "selfed" this flower. It was an older flower but the pollen still looks promising. Some plants are self infertile but I'll hope for the best.

Wildbloomers said:

The pictures of your dissected flowers show flowers that developed extra petals from/instead of the anther tails. Flowers like that often don't produce pollen. However the stigma is usually normal and can be receptive to pollen from another plant. Look for anther tails on your multi petal flowers. The ones with anther tails usually have pollen and will carry the multi petal trait.

Thanks a lot for this information, I think that is the missing master piece. I sure will try again, when the weather permit. Nowadays too much rain and very less flower. Thank again for the info

@Aeonium2003, this is a good chat. I am just not patient and have no time yet but when I take a time off in spring, I will try it.

@kaktus or @wildbloomers @2ManyPlants any updates on your hand pollinations? Did you get new seedpods? No success for me so I stopped doing it.

I just ended up with mutilated blooms that eventually wilted, turned brown and fell with no seedpods to show.

The hand pollination also failed at my side, the 2 seedpods that I get is a self pollination seedpods

GigiPlumeria said: @kaktus or @wildbloomers @2ManyPlants any updates on your hand pollinations? Did you get new seedpods? No success for me so I stopped doing it.

I just ended up with mutilated blooms that eventually wilted, turned brown and fell with no seedpods to show.

Yes I got seedpods and after the requisite 60 days they still showed no signs of maturing. Eventually after more than 90 days the seedpod split so even though it was still fleshy, not drying out, I harvested 60 seeds. I set them out in a covered tray as is my norm and had dismal results. Only three germinated. In retrospect maybe I should have waited to sow the seeds until after the temps got higher. They got about 3/4" tall and made their first true leaves and then just stopped. It's been a couple of months now and they are still the same size and haven't made any progress. I'm still hopeful! FYI this is in response to the hand pollination of the multi petaled peach (no pollen) with the pollen from a multi petaled yellow.

Wildbloomers said: Yes I got seedpods and after the requisite 60 days they still showed no signs of maturing. Eventually after more than 90 days the seedpod split so even though it was still fleshy, not drying out, I harvested 60 seeds. I set them out in a covered tray as is my norm and had dismal results. Only three germinated. In retrospect maybe I should have waited to sow the seeds until after the temps got higher. They got about 3/4" tall and made their first true leaves and then just stopped. It's been a couple of months now and they are still the same size and haven't made any progress. I'm still hopeful! FYI this is in response to the hand pollination of the multi petaled peach (no pollen) with the pollen from a multi petaled yellow.

My natural formed seedpods from
Xmas Santa (similar look to your fighter fish), also had a dismal germination rate. They ripened winter time but then started to turn brown. The seeds didn't look like they had a chance to dry up or plump up. I have 5 seedlings and the ones I reserved and planted this spring had the same poor germination rate.

On one hand, I am disappointed but on the other hand I feel somewhat relieved I don't know what I will do with another 100 seedlings.