More than you ever wanted to know about rhubarb

More than you ever wanted to know about rhubarb

Rhubarb (sometimes called "Pie plant") varieties. 

The site advises buyers to not put a lot of trust in variety names. Some propagators plant seeds and call the seedlings by the mother's name. The seedlings will NOT be identical to the mother.

Two varieties that the authors of the website like are Canada Red and MacDonald. 

Most rhubarb from seeds are the variety Victoria which was introduced in 1837 and was very, very good for its time. The authors write:

Green-stemmed varieties, such as 'Goliath' or 'Victoria,' tend to be more acidic and potentially more fibrous than red-stemmed varieties....Victoria is often not recommended due to its frequent habit of producing flower stems; used almost exclusively for indoor winter forcing. 

Additionally, the prolific production of seeds results in seedlings crowding the rhubarb bed which necessitates more maintenance in terms of thinning or digging and replanting.

Expect variation in quality since much of what is available in commerce are not clones of the original Victoria plant. Rather, "Victoria" is a swarm of similar varieties that may or may-not resemble the original. Sadly, this is probably the most common rhubarb "variety" available to the average gardener. 

I will say that nothing attracts more pollinators than rhubarb when it is in flower. It must be blazingly bright in the infrared band that corresponds to sugars in the nectar. Sadly, they are attractive to pollinators for about three days unlike horseradish which feeds pollinators and parasitoid wasps for three weeks. 

The next most common rhubarb seeds in commerce are probable Glaskin's Perpetual. Glaskin's Perpetual was introduced to commerce in 1920 and is lower in acid and fiber than Victoria.

Final thoughts on rhubarb from seeds

Seeds are dirt-cheap. There is nothing to prevent you from planting a boatload of seeds and then sorting for the reddest stems. My thought process is that the seedlings with the reddest stems are more likely to have modern selections (which were selected for red stems and low fiber) in their recent ancestry. That is, you might be able to use red stems as a proxy for tender, lower-fiber stems.

A second thing about seeds is that most plant virus do not cross from the mother plant to the embryo. Plants that are propagated vegetatively tend to collect viruses which slowly drag-down vigor.