Genetic variability in saffron (Croccus sativus L.) clones

The present investigation was carried out at saffron research station pampore, SKUAST-Kashmir during 2010. Fifty clones were planted in a randomized bock design with three replications. Observations were recorded on 10 randomly selected and tagged competitive plants for 11 morphological, physiological, floral and corm traits viz, plant height (cm), number of radical leaves per plant, stomatal frequency, stomatal size (microns), chlorophyll content (%), number of flowers per corm, fresh pistil weight per corm (mg), pistil length (cm), stigma length (cm), number of daughter corms/mother corm and average weight of daughter corms per mother corm (g). Genotypic differences were highly significant for all the tested traits. Components of variability indicated that a wide range of variability existed for number of flowers per corm (0.80–1.96), fresh pistil weight corm-1 (29.00–65.46), pistil length (4.05–5.83), plant height (23.20–35.60), stomatal frequency (11.20–16.40), stomatal size (microns) (21.03–51.18), number of daughter corms/mother corm(3.46–9.30), average weight of daughter corms per mother corm (g) (3.04–10.60) and number of radical leaves per plant (15.40–26.60). Per se performance of genotypes under evaluation revealed a gross fresh pistil weight of 46.36mg corm-1 from 1.26 flowers corm-1 resulting in 3 kg laccha ha-1 with planting density of 5 lakh corms ha-1 showing an increase of 26% over state average. Estimates of phenotypic variance were higher than the corresponding estimates of genotypic variance, thereby revealing influence of environment in the expression of the traits studied. High values of heritability were recorded for all the traits.