If your two Lehman hybrids are large enough to spare a dormant cutting or two, I would love to graft them onto A. triloba rootstock or a foster tree here in Texas. I have a LOT of plant material I could send you in return.
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So is it that parviflora can’t make patches/suckers or that where it is commonly found isn’t suitable for suckering? Kind of interesting, I never even thought about the suckering trait as unique to triloba.
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It is not unique to triloba. If anything, lack of suckering would be unique to parviflora. All the Florida scrub pawpaws natively form suckers, and it is their primary defense for surviving forest fires. Parviflora will also sucker if damaged. It is more likely that the conditions parvifloras are naturally found in are not the best for suckering in, or conversely, leaves them with no reason to sucker.
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Those flower pictures are really helpful. This spring I found a huge patch of what I assumed where A. triloba, based on their size and location. But their flowers were triangular just like your second picture. I haven’t seen any fruit on them but this has inspired me to go take a closer look. It has been a light fruiting year for both triloba and parviflora in the woods near me.
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I’m going to have to go back and reexamine all of the patches of what I had assumed to be parviflora, those determinations being largely based on the fact that they were not growing under the conditions that triloba would be, as well as their shorter stature.
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The hybids I saw looked much more like Triloba than what I’m used to seeing with parviflora, I think. They are growing on a river bank, which are the conditions I usually find triloba and not parviflora, though there’s definitely parviflora growing on the slope a few hundred yards away. Possibly the triloba and piedmontana are mixed together.
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You are correct, ALL Asimina species (including A. parviflora) and their numerous hybrids produce clonal root suckers, likely as mechanism for surviving and quickly recovering from forest and prairie fires. A. parviflora can sucker, just not as profusely as A. triloba, which tends to form large clonal groves over time.
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Whenever you find A. triloba and A. parviflora growing in fairly close proximity it is reasonable to expect some A. x piedmontana specimens in the area as well. Again, the most definitive evidence for identifying this hybrid is floral morphology, so March-April is the best timeframe for distinguishing between these taxa. In rough numbers, there are about 300 ‘confirmed’ iNaturalist observations of Asimina x piedmontana and about 5,000 observations of Asimina parviflora, so the hybrid is relatively rare compared with its less-common and more geographically restricted “parent” species (for the record, there are about 50,000 iNat observations of Asimina triloba, but it spans a much, much larger geographic range than A. parviflora). It also appears that Asimina x piedmontana struggles to set many fruit (even more so than its 2 “parent” species). It is unknown if it can be successfully pollinated with pollen from either “parent” or if it requires non-clonal pollen from another A. x piedmontana plant. If you do encounter what you suspect are wild A. x piedmontana specimens I would strong encourage you to document them with numerous photos and upload them to the iNaturalist website or smartphone app to confirm the identification and expand the scientific database.
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Asimina x piedmontana often co-occurs with A. triloba (and/or A. parviflora). Although the two “parent” species have somewhat different habitat and soil preferences, these can still occur close enough to each other to allow cross-pollination and resultant hybrids.
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I plan to do this next spring when they are blooming. I still haven’t made it back out to closely scout for fruit, and even if I did find any it might be triloba fruit, as I’m not sure which of the hundreds of plants, no doubt mostly clonal suckers, are triloba (if any) and which are piedmontana.
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