When the Plants Start Talking to You: Breeding New Ornamentals
Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture Guest: Dr. Ryan Contreras, Professor, Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University Producer: Rich Braman Episode: S02E08, Blooms and Beyond, Season 2 Duration: 52:52 Air Date: August 16, 2026
Welcome to the Episode
Ping Yu: The Blooms and Beyond podcast, a podcast that uncovers plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. I’m your host, Ping. How’s everyone doing today? I am doing great because here I have one of my fellow horticulturists, a previous Bulldawg, and my colleague and friend, Dr. Ryan Contreras from Oregon State University joining me today.
And we’re going to talk about one of the, I think, very important topics about applied breeding techniques, especially for ornamental. So I know he has tons of knowledge and story to share, so I don’t want to steal any more thunder from the speaker today. Let’s just jump right into it. Without further ado, here is my conversation with… Dr. Ryan Contreras. I hope you enjoy.
From North Carolina to Tifton to Oregon
Ping Yu: So, hi Ryan. Welcome to the podcast. But first, let’s start off with the introduction. Can you tell our audience a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Ryan Contreras: Good morning, Ping. I appreciate the opportunity to get to speak with you today. Yeah, I am a professor at Oregon State University and I have been here since December 2009. I came straight from Tifton, Georgia. So I did my PhD with John Ruter. So I spent three terms finishing up coursework in Athens and getting started on research before I spent two years down in Tifton. Some of your listeners are probably familiar with that and with that location.
I was really fortunate to get to work with Dr. Ruter. I had a lot of leeway and it was a really great opportunity to, I think, prepare without being a postdoc, but to prepare for the complete free reign of being a new professor. So when you start as a professor, there’s not anyone there to hold your hand and tell you what to do. So this was a good opportunity working with Dr. Ruter. He gave me some guidelines as far as we’re going to work on these crops. But I got to do a lot of different things and so that was really exciting, and plus when he was down there at his program, it was one of the great plant collections, especially conifers in the Southeast. And of course, it doesn’t exist anymore. But anyway, that was a really great opportunity.
Before I was in Georgia, I did my bachelor’s and master’s at North Carolina State. I did my master’s with Tom Ranney and again was at an off-campus location to do my research there. And of course Dr. Ranney leads a really large program up in Mills River, North Carolina.
I’m maybe a little bit of an outlier as far as breeding goes. Many folks when they come through, you tend to bounce around and I would say probably fewer folks are still working on the same crop that they started with. But I’m super fortunate that during my undergraduate, toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I got to work with Denny Werner, who was working on Buddleja. And so I started, you know, that was my first exposure to plant breeding.
And so I worked with Denny, who I’ll give a quick plug, this is also a Georgia connection, but Dr. Shyam Tallury is a cytogeneticist. And he was previously at NC State, and that’s where I was working with him. And he now is the curator of the peanut collection at the USDA in Griffin, which is fun. But he put me in touch with Shyam. I worked in peanut genetics for a couple years. But then since then, when I worked with Tom and then working with Dr. Ruter and then now here, I’ve been working on ornamentals, woody plants, basically my entire career other than two years in peanut genetics.
So I think that’s probably enough rambling about where I came from. I’m a North Carolina guy. I come from the beach of North Carolina. So being in Oregon, it does fit me, but it’s pretty far away from where I started out.
Ping Yu: I was going to say, if you’re from North Carolina, I mean, it’s basically opposite. But well, temperature wise, well, it’s not that extreme different in Oregon. Great place to live.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, it is interesting. I’m up near the 45th parallel here, but we’re actually a Zone 8 where I am in the Willamette Valley. We’re a very different Zone 8 than where I was in Tifton, Georgia.
Ping Yu: Of course.
Ryan Contreras: You know, with the amount of heat is vastly different. But it actually, yeah, we’re more temperate here than even in eastern North Carolina where I’m from. So it’s a good place to grow trees. We get cool and we generally stay cool and yeah, it’s a good place.
The Longer List of Mentors
Ping Yu: Yeah, and I know that you mentioned a lot of names throughout your trajectory and I have to tell you those are great breeders, researchers themselves, but also apparently a great mentor because they give you all those techniques and soft skills even that you normally don’t get from grad school and those skills are actually the ones that make you successful.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, there’s a much longer list.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: And if I could give one piece of advice if you have graduate students that are some of your listeners, which I’m sure there are, is take advantage of the folks that are willing to give you their time and listen to them.
Again, the list of mentors is far longer. At NC State, I was around Craig Yencho, who is a legendary sweet potato breeder. I learned a lot from Paul Fantz in teaching plant ID. And at Georgia, Wayne Hanna is, again, he’s been around and basically had three different careers, reinvented himself in different crops and, yeah, learned a lot from him and Dr. Peggy, as I say, Ozias-Akins.
Yeah, there’s just a massive amount of people, and what I think what often maybe gets left off of the, or who gets left off of the, the, the thank you list is the technicians, man. That, if you want to learn how to grow the stuff and how the day-to-day actually happens, Nathan Lynch and Joel Mowrey and Tom Eaker at NC State were the ones who were doing it on the day-to-day basis when I was there. And Nancy Hand and the other folks down in Georgia, yeah, I learned a ton from them.
And another thing that I’ll say is that you get to observe management styles and talk to those folks a lot. You get to learn what works and what doesn’t work from a management standpoint. So that’s, yeah, there’s… Getting to this stage, there’s a lot of folks to say thanks to.
Ping Yu: Yeah, I am with you.
Chicken Houses, Ag Ed, and the Class That Changed Everything
Ping Yu: So, anyhow, Ryan, I’ve known you for a couple of years already. What first sparked your interest in horticulture in general? Do you see yourself as a nature kid growing up? Because we know you started your breeding, or ornamental breeding, towards the end of your college or bachelor’s degree. Before that, how did you, do you know if horticulture is a thing?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, so I grew up, when I was a kid we had Coastal Bermuda hay, we had hogs and rabbits, and I actually grew up with, there were 32,000 laying hens. So it was chicken houses before automation, so it was picking up by hand. And all sorts of diversified farming on a small to modest scale.
So I grew up in that fashion. I was in an ag program when I was in high school, and I had a really great example who wasn’t my sister, but was basically my sister. If you’re from the South, this is how it is. She was family, but not family. And she had gone to NC State and got a degree in Ag Ed and Extension, got a master’s degree. And so I saw that as a really great career path. And I think like many folks who, if you come from an Ag, you know, a school that has an Ag program, I think there’s a lot of greenhouses that are being used as greenhouses.
So I had that and desire to… I wanted to go become the ag teacher, move back to Beaufort, go to East Carteret, be the ag teacher, and actually develop a horticulture program. So I thought that would be a really rewarding career path.
So I started in ag ed and extension, and during my, I think it was my second semester, I was taking animal science and all of these other metalworking and things that I, it was fine. But then I took my first horticulture class and anybody who’s from NC State knows Bryce Lane, and Bryce is a super charismatic, compelling, amazing instructor. And after I took Bryce’s class, I said, “Yeah, the other stuff is fine. This is what I want to do.” And so then I transferred into horticultural science.
The Summer That Cured Him of Wanting a Nursery
Ryan Contreras: And after that, for a long time I thought I wanted to be a grower. And I have a great story about why I decided to move from that. I was working at a nursery in Apex, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh, called Chewning Nursery, specialized in evergreen azaleas. And fantastic operator, fantastic nursery. I learned so much working there.
But every summer, the owner, it was a small, small as far as there was only like four or five employees. And, but every summer. The owner and his partner, they would leave and go down to Wrightsville Beach for a beach volleyball tournament. And during that time, it’s like August in North Carolina in the Piedmont, so insanely hot, and I realized that basically I was the only thing standing between kind of financial ruin and this guy. So.
To me, I couldn’t deal with the stress of being chained to the nursery that hard and then having to turn it over because I was a college kid and I was probably more responsible than most, but at the same time, I, you know. It just, that stressed me out. And that cured me of wanting to be an owner/operator of a nursery.
So I actually got interested in, started getting interested in research. And the first research that I thought sounded interesting was weed science. I thought that was fascinating, that you could conduct a career in research that would help solve, especially at that time when I was out weeding all day, every day. I thought that was just the bee’s knees.
I then went and again toward the end of my career, I did my internship at a really interesting place. I was at Arizona State University, the Center for Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis with Ken Hoober. And it was completely basic science. We were radio labeling protein constituents and figuring out where these light-harvesting complex proteins were being assembled. I learned a lot of lab technique, but more importantly, I learned that what I wanted to do was not be in the lab 100% of the time in a windowless room radio labeling proteins.
So that’s when I came back and then I got working with Denny. I’m like a little bit of a hybrid. Like I don’t have, I think I’m a little jealous of those folks that have the origin story. That’s just really beautiful. My grandpa got me interested in petunias and this and that. Yeah, a little bit of a circuitous route, but yeah, I come from agriculture and…
Ping Yu: But I think it’s a great example of horticulture is part of the… agriculture, and I actually talked to one of the ag teachers and I was just amazed how the education in ag program can really change some people’s life and people just don’t realize it.
The Breeding Toolkit, from Recombination to Gene Editing
Ping Yu: But anyhow let’s talk about breeding because you, like you said, you have worked with different people, from row crops, economic crops like peanut, and then working with ornamental breeders and all that. So can you give us a overview of some of the applied technologies that has been used for breeding?
And we know ornamental can be a little bit different because some of the techniques are not going to be used in ornamental. But just to give us an overview of the breeding techniques that you have learned over the years, and then we can talk more about the ornamental part.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I guess I’d start with breeding essentially is not a very complex science. Its essential nature of breeding is observing variation and then choosing something that’s better for whatever trait is of interest. Yogi Berra, I think, he has all these great quotes, but Yogi Berra said, “You can learn a lot, or you can see a lot just by looking,” or something like that.
And I mentioned Wayne Hanna, his first publication, this was back in the day, but his first publication was in Science, and it was, I forget what the phenomenon was, but it was literally, he just was observant in a greenhouse and noticed something different in these maize plants than what was typically going on.
Really, the most basic part of plant breeding and really what it is essentially is creating variation and then choosing plants from that variation. There’s obviously all kinds of different ways to create variation and lots of different techniques, as far as, and it’s different for self-pollinated crops versus outcrossers.
I don’t know that it’s worth, and I’m certainly, I’m not a, I’m not the person to give a techniques lecture on plant breeding, but the most common way that we create variation is during sexual recombination. So when you make a cross or you collect seed, those plants, unless they’re apomictic, have undergone some sexual recombination. Then we grow out those populations and look at those. The most common and easiest way to improve plants.
We often hybridize good by good. So you’re crossing elite by elite. And elite doesn’t necessarily mean in every way, shape, or form. So for instance, I’ve done some work in Cotoneaster and my “elite by elite” often is I take something that works well in production, has a good shape, is otherwise good, and preferred by the industry, but it may lack fire blight resistance. So we’ve done this very thing where we then cross with something that has fire blight resistance, trying to get that good shape and form for the industry, but incorporating disease resistance.
Let’s see, I don’t know what they’re… So hybridization, open pollinated things, just taking advantage of natural genetic recombination is still going to be the most common.
Ploidy Manipulation, Mutagenesis, and the Cobalt Source
Ryan Contreras: We use a lot of other techniques to incorporate or induce variation. I use a lot of ploidy manipulation, so that’s just doubling or changing the number of copy of chromosome sets. So the most common reason for doing that in my program is to develop seedless forms. So bananas are triploids and that renders them seedless, so we’re trying to do that on a lot of nursery crops.
We do a lot of mutagenesis. There’s non-targeted mutagenesis, which we use much more commonly. And you can use chemicals like ethyl methanesulfonate, which is EMS, or physical mutagens like x-rays or gamma rays. I’m fortunate that here on campus we have a radiation center and they have a number of different, they have fast neutrons and other sorts, but we use a cobalt source that is, it gives off gamma radiation.
We have a source here and we, it’s, you don’t know what you’re going to get. So the, the. The Forrest Gump, life is like a box of chocolates. We never know what we’re going to get. We’re just taking a shotgun and pointing it and blasting and then growing out populations of those looking for useful variation.
Then more advanced techniques now as we are learning more about genomes and we have gene targets, we can do targeted editing. There’s traditional transgenics and all of those sorts of technologies are still available.
Yeah, I guess I didn’t mention tissue culture, but that’s certainly an important part of those, of the more advanced techniques for gene editing or for transgenics. That’s maybe, you know, aside from self-pollination or cross-pollinating and apomixis and there’s other sexual, like sex expression.
The ability to conduct tissue culture or regeneration from undifferentiated callus is a major difference between our woody plants and many agronomic crops. Yeah, we don’t have the capacity to regenerate a lot of our plants from that undifferentiated callus. So that regeneration has become our bottleneck.
That, in addition, we just have studied many of our plants a lot less. Corn, cotton, soy, wheat, all of those things, they’ve been sequenced and sequenced and we’ve got high level, high quality, chromosome level genome assemblies and so we’ve got all of these gene targets, and we just know a lot less about our woody plants. I don’t know, Ping, I’ve rambled for a bit.
Why Ornamental Breeders Rarely Backcross
Ping Yu: I think you got most of the… You pretty much drew a big picture of the ornamental. It’s not comparable because for some of the economic crops, like you mentioned, the row crops, soybean, maize, and other crops, they’re only working on one plant. And look at us, we just have so many different plants to work with, so it’s not our fault. It’s actually a good opportunity for us to explore more.
So what I’m hearing now is from the plant breeding techniques we typically have two categories. The traditional one would be the sexual, either crossing, hybridizing, and mass selection. Those are categories as the traditional one, where, like you said, you just go out and observe and then select the varieties whichever fit your goal to select the plant. And the second one would be like more modern or advanced techniques including the marker and genome editing and mutation like you mentioned. Maybe tissue culture may be part of that too.
But in terms of, because I remember before our recording you said for some of the row crops they do, and even vegetables they do, like for instance backcross. But we’re not using that in ornamental. Can you tell us a little bit on that, why we are not using backcross breeding that often in ornamental?
Ryan Contreras: Backcrossing is actually… So, in fact, I have four new hibiscus cultivars that are being released now. One reason that we might not use backcross in the most essential sense is woody ornamentals tend to suffer from inbreeding depression. And so we’re always trying, they’re highly heterozygous and many crops won’t self-pollinate.
So hibiscus is, Hibiscus syriacus is one that most cultivars have a very low, low rate of self-pollination. So even if you do self them, you get few or no seeds. And if you do get any, they tend to be a little bit weaker. So we typically are not going to. I take cultivar X, cross it with Y, and then take that progeny and backcross it to cultivar X.
But there’s like a, I’m calling it the pseudo-backcross that we’re using with these hibiscus cultivars where we’re taking hybrids of Hibiscus syriacus and Hibiscus paramutabilis that were already in existence and then we’re doing what I’m again calling this sort of pseudo-backcross, back crossing to Hibiscus syriacus to improve the cold hardiness of those. And so we’ve now got these tree-form hibiscus that are really vigorous and they grow like trees, but they have a little improved hardiness over those previously released cultivars of Tosca, Lohengrin, and Resi.
Yeah, but primarily, you don’t want to… You don’t want to keep a narrow genetic base when you’re working in woody plants. They typically suffer from inbreeding depression. Backcrossing to one of the parents is going to continue narrowing that and you’re likely going to get inbreeding depression.
Ping Yu: Yeah, so for folks who is wondering what is backcrossing, it is actually a process where you make a cross of a hybrid, which is the offspring, with one of its parents. That’s just put out there so people would understand more.
Where Breeding Ideas Come From
Ping Yu: So when you as a breeder, especially a woody breeder, that you work a lot on woody plant breeding, when you start a breeding program, where does the idea usually come from? Is that from a grower problem, a market gap, or just your personal curiosity? Probably it’s a combination of all those, but can you give us an example of that?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, that is, it’s great. It’s the most fun part, I think, actually, is like coming up with the ideas. In my program, we’re not the largest, but we’re, I think, one of the more diverse. We have germplasm and small projects, at least, on close to 50 genera. And, yeah, the ideas, they do, they come from all of those places.
I’ll give you… so for 14 years I taught plant ID and just recently have stopped doing that. But one of the plants that I taught, that I taught it just because it was nearby, was Kolkwitzia amabilis. And… I taught it. We didn’t have a good specimen on campus. I literally taught it. There was a seven-foot-tall privacy fence, and the plant was climbing over it and would come down onto the sidewalk. It’s where we could access it on the sidewalk.
But it’s a plant that’s been around for a long time. It’s really hardy, bulletproof. We call it elk-proof because you’ll find it in these old homesteads, but it was just giant. It just needed to be smaller.
Another example I got here, I had not really encountered flowering currant, but man it flowers in the spring or in the early spring. It’s one of the, it’s kind of like forsythia. It’s the harbinger of spring. And Ribes sanguineum is just gorgeous, but then after it flowers it’s just leggy. And so those are examples where I’m just noticing. I’m a gardener as well, and so that would be great. It just needs to be a little bit reined in.
Grower Problems: Cherry Laurel, Maples, and a Fragrance from a Hundred Feet Away
Ryan Contreras: There are other times where… Laurocerasus. Huge crop, right? So we’re the, Oregon is the number one producer of common cherry laurel, and that’s one that growers repeatedly come to. They want to solve cherry laurel or shot hole disease, and they want to solve the issue of seeds. Because there’s out here, we have western cherry fruit fly. So you’re limited on shipping to certain states because of western cherry fruit fly. Plus, it’s a bit of a weedy species. That’s long been a big priority.
Similarly, maples. There are a number of really weedy species of maples. Oregon is also number one in shade trees and particularly in maples and so it’s really economically important to our growers.
There’s other crops that you just stumble in because they’re fun and there’s a lot of diversity. I had the opportunity to go to Santa Cruz Arboretum early in my career and I was probably a hundred feet away from a Philadelphus madrensis and the fragrance from it was just insane. I got up on this plant and it was incredible. So we took cuttings and brought it back. And that triggered a whole Philadelphus breeding program.
Trends, Growers, and Brands
Ryan Contreras: You know, I’d be lying if I didn’t say there are times when I look at trends in the nursery industry. If you’re chasing a current trend, you’re too far behind. I’ll say that. But there is some level of trying to predict what’s going to be hot. And I do that. I’m not a marketing person, but I try to observe that.
But it’s more talking to growers. I spend a lot of time. Not as much as I would like these days. I’m in my office too much. But I talk to growers a lot and try to see what are their pain points. Labor is a pain point, and it doesn’t matter where you are. Labor is a pain point.
We do try to grow plants, or try to develop plants that are going to have fewer touches in production. We have a few promising selections. We’ve got a… I guess I maybe shouldn’t say. But we have a few things that are coming out that that’s really the improvement. Is that they root easier, they remain more compact, and they just require fewer prunings during the production process.
We are maybe… My consumers, of course, we want home gardeners to enjoy our plants or landscapers or whatever, but really my first and most immediate stakeholders and my customers are the wholesale nursery industries. It has to work for them. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and gorgeous the plant is. If you can’t make more of it and you can’t make any money on growing it, then it’s not going to go anywhere. Yeah.
One more, just in my final, and I’ll let you ask your next question, but brands are really, have reshaped all of this. So, yeah, I am trying to work with all of them. So we do have some really close relationships with a couple of companies and a couple of brands. But I’m trying to work with everyone because we, being a public breeder, I do think I take that seriously. Yeah, I want to make sure that we’re helping the whole industry and not just one or two. But yeah, the brands have just completely…
So I listen, I try to listen to those folks because they’re much more savvy about what sells and what doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, I don’t make money, whether the plants sell or not, I’ve got my salary.
Ping Yu: Yeah, and also they have the data, the first-hand data that can tell them the popularity of a certain plant. And like you said, we… don’t. You cannot, if you are predicting the… or following the current trend, it’ll be too far behind.
It’s really something that I call breeders. If we’re in a fashion industry, I call them the fashion designers, because especially woody ornamentals for breeding, and if you want to create a new cultivar that will become popular, you have to trace back to start working it maybe 10 years beforehand before it can hit to the market and becoming the next fashion in the market. So it really is a hard work and long process, just for taking one plant out, just to make one plant to the market.
Ryan Contreras: You know, maybe that’s the good news is that it takes so long but you don’t really need to chase the trend, because if you’ve ever heard Dr. Dirr talk about the plant clock,
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm.
Ryan Contreras: you would think that it’s like fashion. Like you mentioned fashion, and now the clothing from the ‘90s when I was in high school is, like, back in fashion now. So everything is gonna come back around and it takes me 17 years to release a cultivar. So who knows what’s going to be hot in 17 years. That’s why we work on so many different crops.
Ping Yu: Yeah, yeah.
The Technique He Relies On Most: Walking the Plots
Ping Yu: So over your career, I know you have so many different breeding programs going on, sometimes simultaneously, but which breeding techniques have you found yourself relying on the most? And which surprised you by being less useful?
Ryan Contreras: Oh man, I should one day look it up and see exactly when he made this quote, but Norman Borlaug, as I say it all the time, he was asked, “How do you become a great wheat breeder?” And he says, “You go to the field, and you go to the field some more, and when the wheat plants start to talk to you, you’ve made it.”
So the most useful techniques, far and away, in my observation, are being out there, walking the plots, seeing what the plants are doing on a regular basis, not just once a year, but frequently, and getting input from growers. Whether that’s in my own plots or distributing plants under a material transfer agreement and having them grow them in their own place. I get way more from that.
It also is the most surprising and sometimes the most frustrating, where I think something is just the greatest thing since sliced bread and it either doesn’t work, has some great fault in production, or whatever.
What has been disappointing? I don’t know if it’s disappointing or surprising, but I guess I continually… Every time I see a graduate seminar on QTLs and marker-assisted breeding, I always ask, how has that directly translated into a new cultivar coming out? And I think, yeah, there are really great examples. So I mentioned peanut breeding, there was nematode resistance, they had a rapid marker. Right next door is the hazelnut breeding program that has been insanely successful on breeding for eastern filbert blight resistance using marker-assisted breeding. So there are really great examples out there.
But I… Yeah, we don’t use a ton of that. And so that’s, we are doing work in that realm, especially on lilacs because it takes a long time to phenotype them.
Yeah, I guess that’s, and this is advice I got from mentors long ago, is ask why are we doing this? Now, an okay answer is if you’re a new professor and to get publications, advance the science, learn something more that’s foundational, that’s a valid reason. So I’m not saying that this work isn’t important, but I will say if your goal is, you know, cultivar development, ask yourself, like, is this getting me closer to a cultivar?
And I’ve yet to see anything that is more, that gets us there quicker than creating variation, whether it’s mutation, polyploidization, crossing, open pollination, whatever, growing them out and then looking at them. Dr. Dirr, it could be argued whether he was a plant breeder or not, but I would say absolutely he’s a plant breeder because even though he used a lot of open pollination, he looked at the variation, selected something that’s superior, and moved it ahead. And that is plant breeding.
The Watering Analogy
Ping Yu: And I think that might be one of the techniques that you use regularly, or most of the breeders use regularly, but some students may not realize how important it is. Based on your description, they were like, “Oh, that’s boring and everybody can do it.” It doesn’t require a whole lot of skill set, maybe from their perception, but it is actually the essential technique for breeding.
Ryan Contreras: I would say, I think of it like at a lot of nurseries, the lowest paid person is the most important person, it’s the watering.
Ping Yu: Yes.
Ryan Contreras: Right? It’s insane. And it takes a lot of nuance and a lot of skill and nothing is more important than making sure that everything has the right amount of water, and it’s a difficult skill to develop.
I think of it like walking rows or looking at plants and just having the eye for what’s better. And, you know, it could be argued that no one has ever had a better eye than Dr. Dirr.
I’ve got a plant that is currently being evaluated or considered by a major plant brand, and it was just a seedling that’s here on campus. I go to lunch in a building that’s nearby, and I observed it and said, “Man, that is different and that is better than what I have seen in the industry.”
You can look down on these as being not fancy technology, but it’s about what your goal is. If your goal is to introduce something that’s better, I don’t think you… You don’t have to be running markers or doing CRISPR or anything fancy.
Ping Yu: Yes.
When the Field Beats the High-Tech Approach
Ping Yu: Since we’re talking about this, can you just give us an example where you say the classic techniques and just go out there in the field and look at the plants, kind of outperformed more advanced or sexy high-tech approach? I mean, we’re not here to say that all those high-tech approaches are not as important as the traditional ones, but sometimes, you know, you kind of have to combine those two to reach your goal, as you said, depending on what your goal is.
Ryan Contreras: That is an interesting question. I guess it would be lilacs because that’s the only one where I can compare both of them. We’re working toward, so we’ve been sequencing lilacs and we’ve done genotyping by sequencing and we have some markers that are associated with reblooming. And we’ve been working on that since… 2013 and still don’t have what I would consider to be really useful and identified, validated, effective markers.
So that’d be my best example. And I think not from my own program but, yeah, I see in my colleagues there’s these students are doing really fantastic work. They’ve identified these QTLs that explain lots of the variation, but at the end of the day that’s not how the cultivars got developed.
Validating the Field Observation
Ping Yu: What about using some of those high-end, high-tech approach to kind of confirm your field observation? Do you have an example of that? Or sometimes the observation and the technology results might be contradictory.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I mean, we do have SNP markers that are related to reblooming. And so we’re going to turn those into markers. And so we absolutely, that’s at the end of the day, we will ultimately validate our field observations for reblooming. And we want to tie all that together. And that’s gone down this trail a little bit. That’s part, to me, part of the larger knowledge-seeking that’s going to benefit lots of crops.
In horticulture, there’s a lot of… Remontancy and reblooming is huge. You could argue that it started with Buddy Lee on Encore azaleas, but Encore azalea, Endless Summer hydrangeas, Knock Out roses, those things revolutionize those genera for what people expect. Now, you can hardly sell it unless it blooms either continuously or at least more than once or on new wood. You can’t really sell hydrangea, rose, or azalea. So those have really changed it.
But we are trying to do gene discovery and identify markers that are associated with those. Yeah, so at the end of the day, we want to validate.
Yeah, these traits especially, the environment plays a huge role. And you can manipulate, a good example is ‘Palibin’ lilac is non-reblooming. It doesn’t, I don’t think it has the genes for reblooming. But if you shear it at the right time of year in early spring, it will flower in July. And I’ve seen growers do that. Van Essen Nursery, I’ll never forget, it was late July and I showed up at their nursery and ‘Palibin’ was in full bloom. And that was because of how they had manipulated the environment. So it’s not, that’s a different thing than remontancy.
And so we want to make sure that we’re not inadvertently doing something weird in our environment that is causing our plants to re-bloom. We’re trying to make sure that there is a gene there.
And then, oh by the way, you know, if we can figure out what the mechanism is for lilac, what it is for hydrangea, what it is for rose, and what it is for azalea, then maybe down the road when we have better technology or we figured out new ways, and there’s already been a lot of new work that’s done in introducing CRISPR technology through non-tissue-culture-based methods. So that’s going to be another huge leap forward if we don’t have to go to undifferentiated callus tissue and then regenerate plants. If we can introduce it through other means, that would be a huge benefit.
When Reality Changes the Breeding Goal
Ping Yu: But we talk about the breeding goals and there’s a lot of breeding goals depending on what plants you are working on. For instance, you talk about the lilac reblooming and some plants are disease resistant and making it more compact, basically making the whole plant better. But can you share a story where your kind of breeding goal changed halfway through because the reality hit? Because ideally you want everything to work and then you have the perfect plant, but there are things that we cannot change.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, so I had, one of my early ideas when I came here, I had worked on Japanese cedar using polyploidization. Oregon leads the nation in arborvitae production. And I drive down the road and there’s these arborvitae with mostly ‘Smaragd’ or ‘Emerald Green’. And during the winter, it turns that rhodoxanthin brown, brown or red or purpley. And so I had this idea that I could develop polyploids that would be non-winter-browning.
And I went and spoke with the folks at A&R Spada Farms. I had already been doing this work and would go in very excited about this idea and he just said, “I don’t care about that.”
And so I said, “Do you get calls about these things turning brown?” He says, “Oh yeah, every year we get some calls. I tell them to wait two months and then they’re going to turn green.” And they do and then they don’t call back. That was the answer.
And he said, “But if you could give me spruce spider mite resistance,” because that’s, throughout the industry, that’s a major issue. So that impacts the bottom line. They don’t want to have to put out this active ingredient. It costs money. There’s additional chemicals in the environment.
And so that was one that… But finding that source of resistance is the trick. And finding the source of resistance in something that will be compatible and give us something that has a similar phenotype, right? So we want it to look like ‘DeGroot’s Spire’ or ‘Smaragd’, or you know, these other cultivars that are popular that people want.
Oh, and by the way, we also want it to be deer resistant because arborvitae are highly attractive to deer. That’s when you get to, “All right, I can’t do spruce spider mite, the phenotype. Oh, it’s got to be fast.” So it’s got to be compact, but it’s got to be fast, but it also has to be deer resistant.
So that’s one where I’m a little bit stymied on how do we proceed. And we have some ideas on what, where we’re going to go from there. But, but yeah, and I don’t feel worried about sharing those ideas with, with your audience because I certainly am not the first one to. To have all of these thoughts, it’s something that people have been thinking about and looking for a long time.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: There’s no shortage of nearly unattainable goals. We want a plant to get three feet in one year and then not grow anymore, require no fertilizer and flower 52 weeks a year.
Ping Yu: See, we just sometimes like, “Oh, we are too greedy for a plant.” We want them to have it all.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, some have said that we as Americans, we’re not okay enough with death and like during, like the change of the seasons. Right? So at times, like, your garden might look like there’s a lot of rot, and it’s just like degrading, and that’s good for next year, but I don’t want my garden to look like that either, to be honest.
Ping Yu: Yeah, you always are looking for something to be, to look at throughout the year. That’s just the human nature.
Time, Labor, Money, and What Gets Bred
Ping Yu: But again, we’re in ornamental, we’re dealing with thousands of different plants and also, we are limited in time, labor, money. So can you tell us a little bit about how those factors actually decide of which, decide your breeding program and decide what you do on certain crops?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, I mean it really is, it’s all money. Trees are really expensive to grow, so that’s a big consideration. I’m actually, I’m hoping to dig trees shortly, bare root them, and then re-space them so that they take up less space after I’ve chainsawed down 85% of them, the population.
But really, it’s a matter of what’s the potential and what’s the need. I’ve spent a lot of time making crosses and cherry laurels because it is a huge crop. We spend a lot of time on maples because it’s a really important crop. I’ve probably spent too much time on hibiscus because it’s not that big compared to cherry laurels or maples or boxwood. That’s one where it’s been kind of interesting, but they’re very fast. And so I think that’s kind of where I balance it. I can do many generations of hibiscus in the time when I have tetraploid Norway maples that have still never flowered that are developed in 2010 or 2011. It’s all relative.
To come back and answer your question, really, it’s “Is anybody going to want it?” and “Is there a demand for it?” And if there’s not a demand for it now, oftentimes what we’ll do is just… shrink it. We don’t, I don’t, anything that’s generally improved I’m pretty hesitant to throw it away completely. Yeah. But we may shrink that program down to just about nothing. We don’t throw it away, we might put it on mothballs so to speak.
Ping Yu: Yeah. You never know when that trend might become popular again, like we mentioned before.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and really it just takes one person at a large grower to find a good niche for it. And so folks would say that Vaccinium ovatum is not a big crop, but it is specced a lot in landscapes here in the Pacific Northwest. And so we’ve got a plant that’s with Briggs. It’s probably underperformed from what they wanted and what we wanted. There’s always tomorrow.
The Cotoneaster That Nobody Wanted
Ping Yu: Yeah, yeah. But over those years, have you ever had a plant that you really loved, but it’s just not, the demand is just not there?
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, absolutely. One of my first plants that I thought was a home run no-brainer, it’s a hybrid. It’s a triploid hybrid Cotoneaster. It’s got pink flowers, good fall color, good form. It withstood 4 degrees Fahrenheit unprotected in a container, isolated, not even jam can tight. So quite cold hardy. And it’s fire blight resistant, never seen a strike on it anywhere. And it roots pretty well. It’s not as fast as some other ones, but it is comparable to apiculatus.
And nobody wants it because it doesn’t have berries. And what we’ve been told is if it’s a Cotoneaster that’s deciduous, it has to have berries. And we’re not…
That’s a great example of I’m not throwing it away, I don’t have a big row of it anymore, but we’re keeping a few of them just in case somebody has to come along. But yeah, that was a great one. It was an early, really excellent lesson and a reminder as to who I’m breeding plants for. I’m not breeding plants for what I think I want. I’m breeding plants for what people who are in the industry, what they need and what they want.
Ping Yu: Yeah, I think that’s a very good quote. We’re just biased for all those plant people. We love them all. We do find value or characteristics for each crop that can be, that need to be improved and that need to be appreciated more. But at the end of the day, it’s a consumer, it’s a gardener who is going to their local garden center and grab the plants and then we’re like, okay, if they don’t have that, then they’re not going to buy the plant. So we are serving them, not us.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and I’ll say not only am I not perfect, which that’s obviously an understatement, but the nurseries and the brands and the whole process is not perfect. There are going to be plants that we introduce that are not going to be great. Dare I say I will introduce some dogs during my career, and there’s one that I’ve introduced that… Yeah, it’s probably, in hindsight, probably shouldn’t have been released.
And there’s going to be more as we go through my career. There’s going to be more plants that, yeah, probably didn’t need to release that. That wasn’t the improvement that it could have been or should have been, or I could have tested it in more places. But at the end of the day, we’re just moving ahead. I’m trying to, yeah. I like this quote, it says “find peace and move with urgency.”
Ping Yu: Yes.
Ryan Contreras: So that’s what I’m trying to do, like trying to be calm and think about things critically but like we…
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Training the Next Generation of Breeders
Ping Yu: So when we’re training the next generation, because I know you also teach. When training students, which techniques do you insist that the students master first?
Ryan Contreras: Master? I don’t know that I’ve mastered any of this.
Ping Yu: Or learn first.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, no, I… And it depends at what stage. If it’s an undergraduate, master’s, or PhD student, it’s a very different thing. But what I impress upon all students as early as possible is, you better learn how the plants are grown. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hazelnut breeder, a blueberry breeder, or a woody plant breeder. You need to understand how the plants are grown, what are the pain points of the growers and the consumer. What are you breeding for? And how is the plant grown? If you don’t know that, then you’re not going to be successful.
And then we go look at plants. We look at them in the field a lot. For my particular program, I don’t let anyone leave without doing some ploidy analysis, some flow cytometry. They’ve got to get on the microscope, look at pollen under the microscope. We try to get people to look at chromosomes, but that’s a difficult technique. You can spend years without really getting that down.
And everybody does some propagation. Everybody does a little seed processing. Really the nuts and bolts things. We stick some cuttings. I want people to understand how our plants work when they leave and know… Yeah, like how you make more of it. We try to make a lot of nursery visits, but as I said, sitting in an office too much. It’s tough to be a good plant breeder when you’re sitting in an office, but it’s the nature of our job these days.
Where to Follow the Lab
Ping Yu: Yeah. With that in mind, if people want to get more information of your lab and follow along your work, we’re just keeping in touch with you. Where do you recommend to them go and find this information?
Ryan Contreras: If you go to horticulture.oregonstate.edu and you go under people, you can find my lab there.
Ping Yu: I’ll put the link, I already have that link in the document, but I’ll make sure I put a link in on the show notes too so that people can find that very easily.
But Ryan, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me, and those information are just valuable for anyone, either students or growers or breeders, to just hopefully get some out of this. And the goal is to grow better plants and appreciate more plants.
Ryan Contreras: Yeah, and I really appreciate getting to talk with you, Ping. And I’ll give a quick plug. I know that you’re involved with IPPS, and I would encourage, if there are any students that are listening to this, we all think about being involved with ASHS and ISHS, but I really encourage students to get involved with IPPS because that’s where you go, you meet growers, you go see these operations, and you really, to seek and share is the motto, and it’s really important. It’s where the rubber meets the road. I would encourage that.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Ryan Contreras: But yeah, thanks again. It was really fun talking with you, Ping. That’s cool.
Closing
Ping Yu: Conversations like this only happen when you support the show. For more information and find ways to support us, please go to bandbpod.com. bandbpod.com.
If you like what you’re hearing, spread the word and share this podcast with the people you love. Make sure you hit that subscription button and give a review for the podcast. And as always, go check out the show notes to learn more about this topic and other topics we featured on the show at bandbpod.com.
Thank you for listening, till the next time, stay healthy and go plants!
Transcript produced for Blooms and Beyond / UGA Center for Urban Agriculture