Intrigued by this fragrant and richly colored seeding of Bonica (not pale pink nor white, as Bonica seedlings are prone to be…) from the late Amanda Beales. An impressive, imho, landscape plant.
Unfortunately, my impression is that it might be sterile. Can anybody offer evidence to the contrary?
I never saw any hips form on mine while I had it, either–a truly excellent rose that I bought on a whim, although it proved to be extraordinarily susceptible to Rose Rosette Virus. With many roses, the virus moves through the vascular system a bit slowly and remains somewhat compartmentalized so that the plant can be kept alive and healthy through vigilant removal of infected parts. With my ‘Ivor’s Rose’, the virus translocated from top to root and then to all other parts in a heartbeat, so there was never any real opportunity to rescue it, although I tried. It had to be destroyed, but only for becoming a zombie rose virus factory.
Stefan
Ouch.
Ironically I was wanting to mate it with North American species’ bloodlines in hopes of creating more resistance.
I really want to have a better knowledge of the progression of RRD. 2 1/2 years ago in the late fall I bought a rose driving through Houston that showed RRD within a couple months, about the same time some killing freezes came through Austin.
I initially feared it had contracted it locally – I had spotted RRD in massive commercial plantings of K.O. two miles away (now all dead) a half dozen years ago, and a couple years later, another planting just over a mile away.
Last year I stopped at the same Houston Garden center (advertising $6 rose bush clearance in late spring) and realized many of them were infected, so I feel confident they were the source, and have seen no signs of RRD in my yard in the 2 1/2 years since bagging and removing the one infected plant.
I think I should be in the clear from that case by now, but I am really worry that the latency might be longer than I realize, and it is my understanding that the insect that transmits the virus can come in on winds from far away.
Crossing it with resistant species would be a good approach if it does have some fertility. It could be that its reproductive organs are simply too buried in petals to do much of anything naturally. To cross with R. setigera, you’d have to use its pollen on a female selection, of course. Other North American species generally tend to work better when used as pollen parents.
The mites that transmit RRV can travel very far on the wind, so you’re never really safe from random new infections, but the farther away (and less upwind) they are, the better for your roses! Effective latency only seems to happen during winter and summer, whenever temperatures (and/or lack of water) tend to prevent roses from growing and flowering. Some of the summer effect is likely from directly suppressed virus replication, but some is also from slowed or halted growth in the roses themselves. If a rose doesn’t express symptoms during more moderate spring or fall temperatures when it’s actively growing, it’s probably healthy.
Even if you do see symptoms, as long as they’re restricted to only certain portions of the plant, it may be possible to intervene and save the rose without having to destroy the entire rose. That works better with cultivars in which the virus doesn’t translocate quickly and freely, giving you a chance to spot the problem and act on it before it’s too late, when the virus has managed to spread from one stem to the crown/root and then to the remaining stems. Presence of initial symptoms in more than one stem doesn’t necessarily mean that this has happened, since there could have been multiple independent infection points, or transmission by mites from branch to branch within the same plant. If you see limited infection, cut some distance below it and then wait to see what happens next (kill and/or trash any infected parts–I use a small butane kitchen torch to toast the infected growth, focused on shoot tips and leaf axils, where the mites tend to concentrate). If you see more infected growth shortly afterward, cut lower. If the infection seems to halt at a single branching point, but new shoots from adventitious buds alongside the infected stem appear to be infected as well, gouge out the tissue containing those adventitious buds on either side of the removed branch. It’s possible for some roses that have been carefully treated in this way to remain healthy from then on. I’ve saved a number of mine.
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