Popular garden shrubs Weigela and Diervilla have tangled, hybrid family trees
Hao F, Sun H, Guo C, Wang Y, Wang L
Native Plants
That Weigela shrub blooming pink and white in your front yard is almost certainly a genetic mashup of several wild species, not a single pure one, so its unpredictable color and vigor come honestly from a long lineage of crossbreeding.
Weigela and Diervilla are two closely related shrub groups that gardeners love for their showy flowers, and it turns out they've been crossbreeding with each other in the wild for a very long time. By reading their DNA, researchers traced which wild species mixed with which, and found that almost all the cultivated Weigela varieties sold today descend mainly from one wild species, Weigela florida, but carry genetic traces from several others too. The plants' family history also tracks big climate shifts millions of years ago that pushed their ancestors across Asia and North America.
Key Findings
Nuclear and plastid DNA confirm Weigela and Diervilla as distinct, monophyletic groups, with four major lineages identified within Weigela.
Cultivated Weigela accessions form a clade sister to wild W. florida, showing predominant W. florida ancestry mixed with contributions from multiple other wild lineages.
Genome-wide tests show strong historical introgression across the tribe, especially involving W. middendorffiana, W. maximowiczii, and Diervilla, linked to Miocene-Pliocene range expansion and later climate-driven contraction.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists mapped the family tree of Weigela and Diervilla shrubs and found that these garden favorites have been interbreeding and swapping genes for millions of years, which explains why so many popular garden varieties are hybrids with mixed ancestry.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Pervasive hybridization and introgression in Diervilleae (Caprifoliaceae).
Diervilleae (Caprifoliaceae) is a horticulturally important lineage with striking floral diversity and a long history of interspecific crossing, suggesting reticulate evolution. We integrated nucle...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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Weigela is a genus of between six and 38 species of deciduous shrubs in the family Caprifoliaceae, growing to 1–5 m (3–15′) tall. All are natives of eastern Asia. The genus is named after the German scientist Christian Ehrenfried Weigel.