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In plants, polyploidy has been a significant evolutionary force on both recent and ancient time scales. In 1950, Ownbey reported two newly formed Tragopogon allopolyploids in the northwestern United States. We have made the first synthetic lines of T. mirus and T. miscellus using T. dubius, T. porrifolius, and T. pratensis as parents and colchicine treatment of F₁ hybrids. We also produced allotetraploids between T. porrifolius and T. pratensis, which are not known from nature. We report on the crossability between the diploids, as well as the inflorescence morphology, pollen size, meiotic behavior, and fertility of the synthetic polyploids. Morphologically, the synthetics resemble the natural polyploids with short‐ and long‐liguled forms of T. miscellus resulting when T. pratensis and T. dubius are reciprocally crossed. Synthetic T. mirus was also formed reciprocally, but without any obvious morphological differences …