Okay, well, now that things are growing once again (and life has settled down a bit…), I’d like to get back to a project I was hoping to start a couple of years ago. I’d like to get some firm data in place for sorting out the exact heritability of color in roses. Why? Good question that. Apart from that I’m fascinated by color, I wish I knew why!
To do this so, I need some help, so…
The first thing I need, and I am quite unable to find it, is a diagram, or photo, or drawing, or whatever, of a section through a rose petal. I’ve tried to make sections myself but apart from a quite decent binocular microscope, I just don’t have the other necessaries to make the petal preparation to look at in the first place. I figure someone, somewhere, must have already done this. So if any of you know where I can find such a thing, I’d really appreciate a link.
What I need apart from that is all the data I can get. What colors were the roses you bred and what color seedlings resulted?
There are a couple of problems with this. One is that the regular ARS colors are … not quite good enough for this purpose. Instead, what I’ve done is get Prismacolor pencils and/or Crayola crayons (ah, a new box of crayons! Still delights me after all these years!) and match the colors to those. Both are commonly available and of uniform color everywhere you go.
The second problem is that while all data is helpful, what would help the most is data on… how should I put this? … “entire litters.” I know most people plant all the seeds they get from a hip and then go on to keep only the strongest. Me, I keep them all until they flower, just to record the color/spottedness/mossiness. As important as knowing what the color results are, is knowing the proportion of colors.
So yeah, this will end up being a huge project. Will I ever get it done? No idea. But I’ll be keeping the results on the Spotted Rose Ranch website if anyone’s interested. (There’s nothing up about it now, still need to work on that page.)
As for rewards… alas I have none to give. But I will share whatever knowledge I get, and knowledge is good.
Good luck this year, everyone!
Link: spottedroseranch.com