Gasaway
A named hazelnut cultivar.
The record
- Parentage
- not recorded
- Origin
- Battle Ground, Washington · found free of disease in 1975
- Rights
- rights unknown — No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Blight
- Complete resistance to Anisogramma anomala, conferred by a dominant allele at a single locus and carried in the heterozygous state
- Pollen
- Late-shedding; already an obsolete pollinizer when it was noticed
- Segregation
- Progeny segregate roughly 50 percent resistant to 50 percent susceptible
Description
Nobody plants ‘Gasaway’ for nuts. It is in this file because almost every eastern filbert blight-resistant hazelnut a grower can buy descends from it.
In 1975 it was standing healthy — an obsolete, late-shedding pollinizer nobody wanted — in a heavily infected ‘DuChilly’ orchard at Battle Ground, Washington that was dying around it. The resistance proved to be a dominant allele at a single locus, held in one copy, so half its seedlings carry it. That is what made it usable: a single dominant gene can be followed with DNA markers, and marker-assisted selection let a breeding programme discard susceptible seedlings before they ever reached a field trial.
The same single-gene architecture is the liability. In 2023 a mutation was detected that lets the fungus reproduce on trees carrying this resistance, and three strains have since been identified in Pacific Northwest orchards. One gene is one lock, and the tenant eventually gets a key. Breeding for quantitative resistance — many genes, each contributing a little — is the slower answer, and it is what the programmes have gone back to.
Where to find it
No source recorded. That does not mean the cultivar is unavailable, only that this record does not yet name a nursery carrying it. Point us at one and it goes in.