Morphological Variation and Evaluation of Gladiolus (Gladiolus Hybridus hort.) Cultivars

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the genetic variability in Gladiolus at Horticultural Research Centre (HRC) of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel University of agriculture and technology, Meerut, during Rabi season of 2014-2015. A total of 53 varieties were evaluated for 27 characters in genetic diversity on the basis of Mahalanobis D2 results of Cluster and D2 analysis indicated that the distribution patterns of Gladiolus genotypes into 8 clusters. Cluster IV contained maximum number of genotypes (13). The grouping pattern of the genotypes suggested no parallelisms between genetic divergence and geographical distribution of genotypes. The intra-cluster was maximum in cluster VII (D2=372.852) reveals maximum genetic diversity followed by cluster II (D2=343.392) and cluster V (D2=150.904) and maximum inter-cluster generalized distance (D2=1855.023) was between cluster VII and cluster VIII exhibited maximum divergence followed cluster II and VIII (D2=1568.477). It is suggested that selection of genotypes based upon large cluster distance from all the clusters may lead to favorable broad spectrum genetic variability for corm yield improvement. The Cluster VII had highest mean values number of corms per plant and genotypes in cluster VIII had highest mean values of weight of corm, weight of corms per plant indicating that by crossing between these clusters may be helpful in genetic improvement of Gladiolus germplasm.