An Analysis of Combining Ability for Height, Leaf Out, Bloom Date, and Flower Color for Crapemyrtle

Abstract

Breeding of crapemyrtle (Lagerstroemia) in the United States has focused on developing hybrids between parents with disease or pest resistance and those with good floral characteristics. The objective of this work was to study the general and specific combining ability of several horticulturally important traits in crosses between pest-resistant parents and those with saturated flower colors. Ten crapemyrtle parents were tested in a factorial mating design including 25 of the 29 possible families. Analysis of variance revealed significant differences (P ≤ 0.05) for all traits for the general combining ability of parents. The cross between ‘Arapaho’ and ‘WHIT IV’ displayed the best specific combining ability for a desirable combination of height, leaf-out time, bloom time, and flower color based on current breeding objectives. Overall, this study revealed the importance of both additive and nonadditive genetic variability in crapemyrtle, suggesting that an integrated breeding strategy to capture both additive and dominance variance would be appropriate for producing new, improved crapemyrtle clones for the four traits evaluated.