Wow such a fun read!!! I grew up around Portland, Oregon and never knew any of this. We did have a neighbor that had a ton of dahlias that she had all in grids with numbers and must have been hybridizing them. She had worked in the strawberry industry at one time and maybe started the hybridizing thing from that. (I was very young and it never really interested me at the time, so I did not ask questions.)
I guess I never even thought about hybridizing or all of that until I started looking for shorter dahlias. I also came here looking for shorter lilies.
For some reason things on my farm grow terribly tall without fertilizer and I am just hoping bred shorter will help me. (It was a hazelnut farm destroyed by the blight in the 1980's and sold off for residential)
Any knowledge how the short Sugar Baby Carpet Border Lily was bred? Just curious.
