My birth year is such that I vaguely remember saving the large ears on the corn wagon to be seed for the next year as well as seed buyers inspecting and selecting some small grain fields for use as seed.

Very plainly I remember grandmother and I saving seeds of zinnias and marigolds and I guess other flowers. We also let lots of seeds fall and patiently waited for them to germinate in the spring to provide us with flower transplants.

The marigolds we grew from saved seed were generally uniform but every now and then you would get a plant showing great variation, usually in height. My guess is that we got that level of uniformity because we only had a mid-sized plant with medium orange and yellow flowers.

As we implied last week, hybridization has changed all that. Hybridization came first to the field crops. Vegetables were the next to get attention, followed by the annual flowers. Perennials, shrubs and trees have been hybridized, I think to a lesser extent, in that order.

Commonly today many plants are grown vegetatively (cuttings or tissue culture) thus by-passing the need to worry about seed uniformity. Cuttings and tissue culture always produce a perfect clone of the parent plant. Tissue culture is a complicated process that permits you to take a few cells from a plant and end with hundreds of baby plants.

Meanwhile, back with the seeds. If you plant seeds from a hybrid plant the offspring will be very mixed. Hybrid seeds must be purchased.

With seeds there are some other interesting outcomes. There are naturally occurring white and purple coneflowers. If grown together, the offspring will be purple. The same can be said for the yellow and red native columbines. Their offspring will be red.

The red columbine and the purple coneflower are dominant. To get white or yellow, the recessive colors, they must be crossed with other recessives. To explain, both my daughter and son-in-law are redheads. You can guess the color of my grandson's hair.

If you plant a mixed bed of the fancy columbines that are available in the market place today and let them colonize, you will, in a few years, have a patch that is uniformly unattractive. To keep uniformity, you must segregate each cultivar.

The vine wisteria often gets a bad rap about blooming. The problem may be that it was seed grown or from a cuttings from a poor performing parent. To be successful, look for a plant in bloom or quiz your plant source about its parent.

Sweet shrub, that sweet shrub that graced almost every grandmother's doorstep when I was a child is also naughty. More often than not, its seedlings are rather unpleasant smelling. The sweet shrub is the one that had an odd shaped, mostly purple flower. There is also a very nice white one in the marketplace today.

If you plant a seedling of a ginkgo tree you may get a nasty surprise in 15 or 20 years when it reaches fruiting maturity, The flesh of the fruit smells like rotting fish. I see seedlings offered regularly, but you want a male. Planting a grafted tree is the only surety that you will not be disappointed in a decade or two.

I could ramble on with more examples, but I won't. My intent is not to discourage seed saving, but to close with a baseball analogy for further explanation. Strikeouts are a lot more common than homeruns.