By Iona Boase
Crop & Food Research Journalist
15 February 2001

A group of floriculture companies with expertise in breeding, production, marketing and exporting has teamed up with Crop & Food Research and signed an international collaborative floriculture breeding programme.

FlowerZone and the Green Harvest group of companies are involved in cut flower export marketing, Calla (Zantedeschia) breeding, bulb and tuber production and exporting, and seed and plant importing. The establishment of the group has been spearheaded by Lyall Fieldes.

Mr Fieldes has always been interested in new floriculture crops with export potential. With a background in horticulture, he followed progress in new crop development and came to know Ed Morgan and Garry Burge at Crop & Food Research.

Their exchange of information led to an agreement to market Chorus Magenta, a new limonium bred by Crop & Food Research. Two and a half years on this variety is proving successful both in New Zealand and offshore, with it winning the top award at major trade shows in South Africa and Colombia for the “best newly introduced cut flower crop”.

Harvested stems of a new Sandersonia hybrid bred by Crop & Food Research in conjunction with SANZA (a partnership involving Bloomz and Geophyte Exotics) are also being successfully exported and marketed by FlowerZone. This hybrid is Santonia Golden Lights and is the first new Sandersonia hybrid to enter commerce.

However, a new project with gentians is generating excitement. Rhindo (the Japanese word for gentian) Development Group is the name of an entity established by Southland Flowers and Crop & Food Research to develop and market new gentian varieties.

Lyall Fieldes recently facilitated the signing of a collaborative breeding programme that incorporates the strengths of the Rhindo Development Group with the Ashiro-cho Floriculture Co-operative, a Japanese company that has a 20% share of Japan’s gentian market (about 24 million stems/year) and is considered a leader in world gentian breeding and production. The contract allows for New Zealand bred gentians to be directly marketed into Japan and for Japanese bred gentians to be directly marketed into New Zealand.

This contract is expected to facilitate the uptake of new varieties; provide for better exchange of information on breeding, growing and marketing gentians; and help to protect New Zealand-developed intellectual property offshore.

“Pretty symbiotic”, is Lyall Fieldes’ description of his partnership with Crop & Food Research.

“We are dealing with people who know their business. It’s an excellent partnership. What I admire is the respect the parties have for each other’s expertise. We respect Crop & Food Research’s expertise in breeding novel cut-flowers and I think we’ve got a very good network of international markets and contacts. "We’ve expanded the basis of our co-operation to include the international collaborative
agreement with Ashiro and it has excellent potential,” Mr Fieldes says.