Your may remember my ideas of developing Alnus glutinosa (or indeed
any Alnus) as a grain crop to be grown on the uplands.

I see the first step as the need to find bigger seeds, wild seeds are
wretchedly small.

In the last 2 weeks I have been going round alders in the Newcastle
area. Many alders from far away have been planted on colliery tips and
old railways and the like, so with natural cross-breeding, variation
is probably fairly large here.

I have gone round, pulled the cones off the trees pressed and scrubbed
the cones between two plates to get the seeds out, and sieved them
through a 2.50 mm sieve. Usually all the seeds pass through and are
waste. But in about 1 in 20 trees I get a significant number of seeds
which don't pass through the seive. They are all much the same size
and shape for one tree, though they can be very different from tree to
tree. I see this as a tree with recessive gene for bigness being
fertilised by another tree with the same gene, which would give a 1:4
ratio, but that is diluted by lots of pollen from other trees. In
random winds the two trees should fertilise each and so I have looked
around for the "the other tree", but I have been unable to find such a
neat result.

The bigger seeds I have found have been quite various in shape and
size, suggesting that size is controlled by many genes, a conclusion
which we would easily accept for man. I may find a really big seed, a
"Koh-i-Noor" seed, and I would love that, but looking at what I've
found so far, I think cross-breeding them can be expected to produce a
seed the size of grains of rice, which would be big enough.

But I want another thing too. That is cones which take up less growing
material and effort, and which release their seeds more easily. It is
hard to define what I want because I haven't found it yet, but any
cones which are visibly different would be of interest to me. "Less
woody, more leaf-like" cone bracts might be one variation that I would
take an interest in. But there might be many others.

There are other desiderata:-

Cones pull off easily. There is huge variation in this trait.

Plentiful cone production. Some trees produce far more catkins than
cones, not what I want! Others produce few cones or catkins.

Orderly growth, a trunk with well-arranged sidebranches, to make
mechanised harvesting easy. (But I have found a natural dwarf tree -
what are the possibilities in that?)

These traits can be found in available trees, I have only taken seed
from trees which have them.

I am searching for bigger seeds using mechanised methods to search
through huge numbers to find a very few of interest. "Defective" cones
are the next thing I want, and looking for that can be done with the
naked eye and is much more like "traditional botany". I would be very
pleased if you don't "go out looking for funny alder cones", but
rather "keep in mind that somebody is interested funny alder cones"
and not just pass it off as an oddity, but to make a note of it,
record its GPS coordinates, take seeds and send them on to me, be
willing to guide me to it, whatever is convenient or appropriate.


Michael Bell.

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