I know that with tomatoes colors like blue, purple, black (dark purple) appear to stay permanently once they are in the DNA, same thing with pomegranates, purple, black (dark purple) always stays during a successful cross. I think that during crossing of a lot of things, there are colors that are there permanently that are always dominant, other colors that can change.
I find that a lot of fruit comes in way more colors that you’d think. Tomatoes are a great example of that, and it seems like the best colors originally came from the smaller fruits, often wild fruits. For example ‘Helsing Junction Blues’ tomatoes, has wild blue tomatoes in the cross used to make it, if I understand correctly crossed with wild cherry tomatoes. The smaller the fruit the less natural chemical there needs to be to color the fruit. ‘Helsing Junction Blues’ tomatoes not only have blue in them, they can have a dark purple skin when fully ripe.
I have paid less attention to peaches, apricots, than I have a lot of other fruit, yet since I want to experiment with some hybridization now, I am starting to pay more attention.
Another reason that I chose the two cherries that I chose as the two best, was because they are disease resistant. Me living in the south I am always thinking about things like fungus based diseases, like cracking/splitting, and so on. A lot of sweet cherries don’t do well in the southern US climates.
Both varieties of cherries I chose it sounds like they taste noticeably better than Bing. Taste is something that I keep in mind when I dream up plans about hybridizing something. One thing that I love about the thought of hybridizing things with cherry is the interesting cherry/heart like shape that the fruit usually has.
I’d also like to see Prunus hybrids, that have much greater pest resistance, while starting to bloom a little later in to the year so that less blooms get hit by frost, which could insure high production.