Preliminary results on the seed production and quality of Tanacetum cinerarifolium (Trev.) Schultz-Bip. in Southern Italy

Pyrethrum (Tanacetum cinerarifolium (Trev.) Schultz-Bip.) is a species belonging to the Asteraceae family. It is native to Albania and Dalmatia (Heywood, 1976), although currently the main producers in the world market are Kenya and Australia. Its importance is due to pyrethrins, natural insecticide, extracted from flower heads, in increasing demand on the world market. In recent years the interest in the introduction in cultivation of pyrethrum in Salento (southern area of Puglia) is ongoing to support economic and productive sustainable regeneration of this area. Actually, the cultivation of pyrethrum in Salento had already been suggested at the beginning of the 1900s and some experimental activities were carried out in Puglia in the early 2000s with encouraging results, using seed from Dalmatia (Tedone et al., 2000, 2004). Despite these good results, the variability of the seed quality and the low germination rate, underlined by several studies, still limited the production of plants with good productive and qualitative characteristics. Therefore, it is considered particularly interesting to undertake research that could contribute developing a program of seed production and clonal propagation. With the aim to assess the possibility of obtaining and using quality seed with high germinability, a study was carried out at the Department of Soil, Plant and Food Science, on a commercial seed provided by Sandemetrio Opificio Erboristico Company (Specchia – Italy) and a Croatian accession provided by Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb (Croatia).