I have very little experience with growing things from saved hybrid seed. I did have a pink butterfly bush reseed though and all of the resulting babies are a dark lavender (or light purple).

I have had probably hybrid tomatoes reseed in the garden, and the resulting tomatoes were tasteless.

My Rose of Sharon's reseed themselves everywhere, and either cross or revert. I ended up with a pure white, when there was no other pure white one on the property or nearby here in the rural. I also had one that had sort of candycane blooms one season, and then different blooms yet the following season. Some of the many Blue Bird seedlings did produce Blue ROS, but it would be hard to say if it was 1in 5 or 1 in 20, or 1 in 100, as I have so many in so many places. I guess they could have even been a seedling from a different color than Blue Bird too.

I would be very tempted to save hybrid seed. The babies may be nearly like the mother, or something cool anyway, but then again, they may be butt ugly.

Sue

This is sort of second hand since I don't know exactly what plants the seeds came from... I planted Joseph's Coat, and every single plant came up completely red.

http://www.plantcare.com/encyclopedia/josephs-coat-1162.aspx
The ones in this photo look completely red to me--not tricolor. That is how every single one of my plants came up!

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:432528}}

That Joseph's coat thing, its just a problem with using common names, cuz sometimes more than 1 thing has that same common name. Using the latin name is more exact but a little harder to find out sometimes when you're trading seeds.

Another example is painted daisy--pyrethum is called painted daisy and chrysanthemum carnitum can also be called cpainted daisy. gets confusing.

BTW, the coneflower thing, from what I can tell, its pretty much a waste of time to save the seeds from the fancy hybruids, specially the big sky series. That didnt stop me from trying it myself tho, its takes sooooooooooooooo long to find out what is going to grow from them tho, and I guess that sometimes you can tell exactly from the first year bloom.

I wouldn't spend money on seeds from hybrid echinaceas, but trading is a different story. I got some yellow, orange and peach flowers from 'Big Sky' and 'Art's Pride' seeds received in trade. I also got a lot of pink ones that were not what they were labeled. But they were from trades, and the plants are healthy.

Becky

My first experience with growing hybrid seed was with Purple Majesty Millet, nearly ten years back. Everyone and their brother were screaming that the seed was a) sterile, b) not stable and would produce anything except purple millet c) would produce mutant plants grown from the saved seed.

Well, phooey. I just hate nay-sayers, so I had traded for seeds of PMM from gardeners around the country and mixed all the seeds into the same batch, and sowed them all together.

Guess what? Purple Majestly Millet grew 100% stable. And since then I've grown many batches of saved PMM seed and they're still stable.

The only time I have ever culled plants was an F4 growout of white marigolds. They had fragged into a collection of beautiful cream and tawny tones. Of that batch two had petals that I would describe as snarly-toothed, so those two plants got yanked. I wasn't surprised by the colorful results, and I did very much like the range of warm creams that flowered. White Marigolds are so far from the norm that Mother Nature's influence was strong and they migrated someway back to their normal color range. Marigolds are beautiful with their vibrant sunny colors; bleaching that out through breeding was, to me, a great big zero. Don't mess with a good thing!

T

Alyssum and a beautiful marigold my daughter gave me a few years back. The seeds always came back true until this year I left them all winter and they wouldn't sprout even though I dried them on the kitchen counter for a few days. I have some older seeds from those and will try to see if I can get them going again. One volunteer came up, and I can save from that and mark specially.

I'm planning on saving a few other kinds this fall. Man, I looked at my PS Rudbeckia, think I want something different, but there are hundreds of seeds in one bloom, don't know if they were ripe yet.

I let one gorgeous iris go to seed and will plant them over the winter to see what happens. Usually I deadhead all those. If these grow they may be ugly because it probably open pollinated with a yellow iris nearby which might make for a yucky combo.

I've got a volunteer campanula in the mess in the back, marked it and think it's safer to let it overwinter there, then move it in early spring. Also there are two tulip trees and one redbud. None would grow straight now so plan to roundup in the spring the whole area once I get what I want out of there/covered.

Redbuds are easy to grow from seed but was told they take 7 years to bloom. I rubbed them between medium sandpaper 20X, planted (suggested on tree forum here), germinated very quickly from neighbor's tree to babies the same spring. I had 27 going and xplanted into pepsi bottles w/holes but should have sunk them into the ground over the winter. They all died.

I think you can probably plant redbuds direct sow if you give them the sandpaper treatment. Otherwise it can take years.

Redbud seeds sprout all over the place in my yard, the neighbor has a tree. Course, I dont know if the seeds that are sprouting are old or not, they COULD be years and years sitting in the soil. :)