Academic Centre
In 1999, our nursery’s founder Professor Rihards Kondratovičs had envisioned a deciduous azalea with yellow double flowers arranged in round, ball-shaped inflorescences. For this purpose, he crossed two cultivars that he thought might yield the desired combination: ‘Homebush’ with bright pink double flowers in round trusses as the mother plant and ‘Austra’ with bright yellow flowers as the father plant.
This crossing resulted in 117 hybrids with flowers in various shades of pink, red and orange in ball-shaped trusses, ten of which have become cultivars, including ‘Ināra’, ‘Vidzeme’, ‘Zemgale’, ‘Sēlija’, and ‘Kandava’.Unfortunately, none of the hybrids had his intended yellow flowers.
Later, in 2007, our rhododendron breeder Gunita Riekstiņa was also hoping to create a deciduous azalea with round inflorescences of double flowers, but her desired colour was white. So she picked one of the Professor’s original hybrids that had the lightest flowers (the recently registered ‘Ārija’) as the mother plant and ‘Babītes Astra’, which has white flowers with a bright yellow blotch on the upper petal, as the father plant.
As she was picking out the most promising hybrids from this batch, she discovered that one of them had ball-shaped trusses of yellow double flowers. Thus, the Professor’s dream unexpectedly came true, and ‘Mežtaka’ was created. It is named after the long-distance hiking route “Mežtaka”, which is the preferred active leisure option of our breeder and her family.
This cultivar’s story of origin serves as proof of how unpredictable a breeder’s job is, as the desired combination of genes might come along only after several generations. To visualize the parentage of ‘Mežtaka’, we have prepared a family tree depicting its parents and grandparents.
