Improvement of Ornamental Plants A Review

Abstract

Ornamental crops provide better income from a unit area with higher profitability. There is huge untapped flower production potential in our country which could benefit a large segments of the weaker sections of the society. Both the domestic market and the export potential of flowers and ornamentals are tremendous. Besides, earning foreign exchange and improving the national income, the floriculture business being labour intensive generates gainful employment to rural youth. Ornamental plants are appreciated by their ability to please the eye of consumers as garden or pot plants or when sold as cut material. The main emphasis in ornamental plant breeding is to improve variety traits, novel colour, form, size, number of flowers, flower vase life, repeat blooming, disease resistance, nutrient uptake capacity and growth habit. Various types of new varieties of ornamental crops have been produced for many years by cross hybridization and mutation breeding techniques, separately or in combination. Many ornamental plants have been originated from inter-specific and inter-generic crosses, which leads to high degree of heterozygosity in the resulting hybrids, often polyploidy and aneuploidy also occur. In the present review, origin, modes of reproduction, introduction, selection, hybridization, mutation and polyploidy breeding of various ornamental plants are discussed in details.