Do you have any siblings, Gonzer? Are they all identical and did your parents give them all the same name? Same with plants! ;-)

Gonzer,
Primary hybrids- bred from species- tend to be fairly uniform. When you start with hybrids as parents, there's a lot more complexity with all the genetic material involved. That's part of the fun of it. You can guess as to what the outcomes will be, but there can be surprises! Paul

gonzer I can only say this...I know of one hybridizer that used the same named plants at different times and produced different offspring both times. If you look at
A. Freeman's crosses he has used the same plants many times with a new named plant coming from each cross. Like Lisa said...same parents ...3 children but none look like the other one

The current operating principle of the registry is "name the cultivar, not the grex".

In the old days you would have to assign a name to the whole grex (the entire population of offspring from any 2 given parents). If you repeated the cross or somebody else remade the same cross, then they would have to use your same grex name, and any distinct cultivars (individual seedlings and all future pups from those clones) you or that other person selected out from the batch would have to be given a second name as well-- the cultivar name.

No more. There are still some remnants of the old system around, like all of the Aussie Dreams. That's the grex name, and then there are all of the cultivars, so you have Aussie Dream 'Glorious', Aussie Dream 'Big Pinky', Aussie Dream 'Rosie', etc. etc.

Nowadays, though, the grex name is dispensed with and you just name the individual cultivar. It doesn't matter how many seedlings were in the cross or how many times that cross has been done, as long as the offspring looks different than any other. Obviously that is something that is debatable, and pretty difficult to check, even with FCBS, but it is left to the hybridizer's discretion.

If you have 100 or even 1000 seedlings from a cross, theoretically you can assign a different name to each one and register them all. There are a few hybridizers who seem to like to do this kind of thing, but I think this is a bad practice. It's far better, in my opinion, to choose the best and the most distinct clones (cultivars) and get rid of the rest, or at least, don't register them. Our esteemed registrar sees it differently, of course. He wants EVERYTHING registered.

Where it gets a bit more complicated is when you have 2 or more clones from a cross that are both good quality, but look so much alike that they don't warrant being given 2 different names. I don't know what the official policy is on this, but in that case I will often use the same name for both/all, followed by #1, #2, #3, etc. It may not be quite kosher but I know I'm not the only one who does this. The alternative would be to either destroy all but one of them, or have a bunch of look-alikes with different names. I don't like either of those options. Obviously they'd have to be siblings. You can't do that with 2 unrelated plants no matter how identical they may look.

The analogy about having kids really summed it up. I guess my next question would be what 'marriage' of two species (let's go with Neo's) has the greatest amount of recognized different siblings? Thanks to all for the above answers too!

That's a tough question, Gonz. As Paul says, you're far more likely to get diversity crossing 2 hybrids than you are with 2 species. The more complex the hybrids, the more different directions the offspring can go in. Also some species have many different cultivars, so a cross with one cv. of concentrica or carolinae is not the same as with another form, even though it's the same species. I'd say without a doubt that those 2 species are the most frequent foundations for Neo crosses, and the variegated carolinae x concentrica clone has mothered an awful lot of babies, but not all by the same daddy.

Going back to the Aussie Dream example, if you believe, as Larnach claims, that every single one of them comes from the same carolinae x olens grex, then I'd have to nominate that combination as the winner, because there must be 30 or 40 Aussie Dream cultivars. Trouble is, I don't believe that for a second! I do believe that Neo. carolinae 'Mother' is the mother of them all, but as to olens being the daddy......... well, she might have told him that, but the neighbors know different. ;-)

There are a lot of legitimate grexes that have 10 or more selected cultivars. Here is just one example (note the hybridizer and search his crosses to find other similar examples):

Here is a link that might be useful: Neo. Fairy Paint x concentrica