← elderberry
rights unknown
Bob Gordon
Wild selection
The record
- Parentage
- Wild selection
- Origin
- Selected by Robert Gordon, Charlotte Cooper and Andrew Thomas · Farmland near Osceola, Missouri · found 1999; released 2011 by the University of Missouri
- Rights
- rights unknown — No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Species
- Sambucus canadensis
- Standing
- Among the two cultivars most recommended for the Midwest by the University of Missouri programme
Description
Found on farmland near Osceola, Missouri in 1999 by a farmer, his wife and a university researcher walking together, and released twelve years later as the programme’s second improved cultivar.
It is now one of the two cultivars the Missouri programme recommends first for the Midwest. Note what that means about the state of this crop: the best available American elderberry in 2011 was a wild plant somebody noticed in 1999, not a cross. Elderberry breeding is at the stage pecan was at in 1910, when ‘Major’ was found in a Kentucky woodlot.
The practical reading for a grower is the same as it was there. Improvement in a barely domesticated crop comes first from looking, and the looking is not finished.