Helix Australia has partnered with King’s Park Botanic Garden to invest in highly sophisticated Waxflower and Boronia breeding programmes that will totally revolutionise the range of hybrids developed in these exciting Australian genera.

Recently released hybrids from the Kings Park Botanic Garden breeding programme include Waxflower Morning Delight, Waxflower Dawn Pearl, Boronia Magenta Stars and Boronia Plum Bells.

Somatic Fusion within the Chamelaucium (waxflower) alliance has been the major breeding programme developed by Kings Park Botanic Garden.

The key outcomes of this research to date are:

• plant protoplasts (the living material of a plant cell after the cell wall has been removed) from a range of species from the Chamelaucium alliance can be reproducibly isolated.
• conditions for establishing protoplast cell division and macrocallus formation have been defined.
• somatic fusions of various combinations of Chamelaucium and Verticordia species have been performed. The fusion environment and techniques are now well understood and will allow the fusion of a range of taxa from the alliance.
• Techniques for regenerating plants from protoplasts via somatic embryogenesis have been optimised to facilitate evaluation of somatic
• somatic embryos from fusions between Chamelaucium and Verticordia are now being treated using the successful techniques above to generate hybrid plants. Given the wide relationship of the two parents , further optimisation of stimulation of embryo germination is being carried out.