Adriaan,

You are right, open pollinated plants often give disappointing results, usually heading towards the muddy pink that seems to be a dominant colour once you have a lot of genes in the pool.

As with human eyes, you need to know the colours of all the grandparents before you can begin to guess what colours the next generations eyes will be.

In selecting breeding lines, the normal process is to back cross, ie to take two plants you want to reproduce, produce seed....flowering plants from the cross, = 1st generation. Then cross this plant with one of the parents(which ever characteristic you want to create), = 2nd generation, then cross 1st and 2nd generation to give 3rd, and so on, eliminate(sell, give away, burn) any plants that do not have the characteristics that you want and select the best for your breeding program, eventually on 4th and 5th generation you will start to get reasonable stability in the seedlings as long as you continue to cross within the breeding line. This is then a strain, such as 'Queen of the Night' developed by Elisabeth Strangman as opposed to a clone, which must be a division of the parent plant with exactly the same genetic material such as 'Ushba' by Helen Ballard.

You will often see plants being sold as e.g. "Helen Ballard Seedlings", or "Ashwood Seedlings", these are where original clones have been bred from to give "type" plants.

The best start to all of this is to select strong healthy plants to begin with, preferably ones which have been bred from pure stock(as opposed to a chance good seedling), from pure stock you will already be on 4th or 5th generation and will have fewer throwback results, saving yourself 10-15 years. So you should take the trouble to find good plants with known ancestry as your starting point. Also selecting the strongest from each successive generations will keep your plants good. Too much selfing, what you have called inbreeding ie crossing the plant with it's own pollen tends to weaken the strain.

Have fun,

Greenmanplants

Thanks for your response to this question Greenman, I've been wondering about this myself.