Heritage Album

Can hybrid plants eventually be converted back to heirlooms?

If I plant enough of them and allow them to open pollinate for many generations, will one of them eventually produce "pure" heirloom quality viable seeds?

Public Comments

1. Usually not. With most hybrids, they must must be hand pollinated, even, meaning that they have lost the ability to even make fertile seed. on their own. (It's an interesting problem, too long to go into here.) You will see in some plant stores that the plant is a hybrid, and someone even has the patent on it. Pansies are that way, as are other ornamental things we grow. Petunias as well come from ancestoral stock that never ever produced such big flowers, nor as many... Sorry. Once a plant has been hybridized by humans, one cannot get back to the originals. But interestingly lots of places have the original plants which you may wish to grow... Try the Burpee catalog.... google them... They have heirloom tomato plants, for example. and they will often send you some seed free to try, or to grow for them, and collect the seed....
2. Possibly... but it's highly unlikely to just happen at random. Heirloom varieties are the result of many, many generations of selective breeding to amplify and purify specific traits, producing plants as homozygous (true-breeding) as possible. Once hybridized, these traits are present but heavily mixed: it'll take selective breeding to isolate them again. This isn't to say that you couldn't produce a reasonable approximation of an heirloom tomato with many generations of selective breeding. It'd be a lot easier to do if you started with hybrids only a generation or maybe two removed from your heirlooms than if you started from wild-type. If you just let your plants cross randomly, though, all you'll get is more (and muddier) hybrids.