It’s a Mrihani x Opalescent basil hybrid, I have about two dozen of these started with a variety of mutations. Most of them have mottled green (as well shown by the plant to the left) and all of them have a beautiful metallic purple shimmer to them. This gorgeous seedling is a beautiful example of a whorled phylotaxy, having four leaves per node instead of two.
I’m going to try to see if I can get this mutation somewhat stable, as it’s double your basil per basil, and who wouldn’t want that?
Neat
What does that process look like?
Basil is self pollinating so I’ll probably keep this one separate, maybe even indoors in a grow tent and probably take some clones from it. From that I’ll let a bunch of stalks or clones flower, collect the seeds, start a fresh batch and cull all the seedlings that do not exhibit the mutation.
Get some healthy plants from that seed stock, breed them back with the original non mutated line to keep it from getting too inbred, harvest seeds, and start and cull those again keeping the desired traits. Eventually you should be able to get ~50-80% of the seeds to grow with the mutation. That’s a completely made up range but you can get mutations and crosses pretty reliable usually.
The most difficult part is keeping them from crossing with other basils, but that’s just because they are very easy to breed and cross and bastardize. Which is how you get here in the first place, I suppose.
That's really cool, I'm looking forward to future updates :)
Basil would be a good name for a fictional character who obsessively whacks his weed.