I’ve inherited a large number of roses,many of which I do not know the identity of, that have many many open pollinated hips on them and I have raised roses from open pollinated seeds before but am still very new to it. It seems a waste to let so many ripening hips go to waste.
I took this image of one of them this afternoon. I know what rose achenes inside tghe fruit look like but was wondering if these things growing on the outside of the hip are also achenes and if so are they worth stratifying?
Thanks for the speedy replies. Looks like I will have quite a lot of these with about 100 hips ripening around the place. I am particularly looking forward to seeing if I can get the 10-15 hips on the David Austin rose ‘Pat Austin’ to ripen properly.Now I need to take a crash course in rose hydribisation terminology
The Pat Austin is covered in hips that are about 3/4 ripe. I have just bought the property and there are about 20-30 roses scattered around the place, a lot of which are laden with developing hips that are just starting to colour up. All the hips were open pollinated so I cannot say what the pollen parents were. I haven’t deliberately used it before but given the sheer number of hips it has it might be worth a crack. I haven’t grown Pat Austin before so my current plant is the only example I have seen, but its shape is very appealing (especially since the previous owner had completely negelected the roses and hadn’t dead headed all season) and it seems very hardy in Tasmania, Australia, and it is still has masses of flowers on it now in the last month of Autumn (Fall) when we’ve already had two heavy frosts. Growing next to it, not more than 2ft away, is Altissimo but if I was a betting person I would have said it was probably self pollinated - but you never know. I don’t know if it makes a difference whether it is the pollen parent or the seed parent but it seems to be fairly receptive to being the seed parent to me. These are basically the only ones in the garden that I can positively ID because they still have tags on them (and Altissimo is pretty easy to ID anyway…), apart from the miniatures green ice and flower carpet apple blossom (which I have also harvested some open pollinated seed from and have been stratifying for the past two weeks). The others have pretty much gone dormant and lost all their leaves/flowers so I’ll have to wait till spring to try and ID these ones. I am keen to try some deliberate crosses but our growing season is quite short here because we are so far south (towards Antarctica LOL) and I am a bit concerned that the hips will not have enough time to ripen unless I do perform the crosses on the absolute first flush of flowers for the coming season. I was reading about the foil bonnets and other ripening strategies in the archive here so maybe I’ll have to do something like that… I’ve got four acres of land at my disposal so will be planting out a trial bed or two to grow seedlings on before culling and transferring the ones I like to the main rose garden.
According to some informal research done by some rose hybridizers, it appears that the hips that are just starting to ripen (turn orange) are at the best time to harvest. If you wait to the hips are fully orange, it seems that the seeds store up more chemicals/hormones to resist germination. This may ease your mind a bit.
