Inheritance of Wood Hardiness among Hybrids of Commercial and Wild Asian Peach Genotypes1

Seven clones of peach ( Prunus persica (L.) Batsch) varying in hardiness, and 5 progenies derived from them were used to study the inheritance of cambium, xylem, and vegetative bud hardiness. Mean progeny cambium and xylem hardiness could be predicted from average parental performance, but vegetative bud hardiness could not. Injury within dates and tissues was highly heritable and environmental variation was very low. Correlations among injury ratings for different tissues, temperatures, and dates were low when based on individual trees indicating poor repeatability of individual genotypes over time. Correlations based on family means were higher. The low correlations based on individual trees indicate that selection based on individual phenotypic performance in a single test might be ineffective.