'Basye's Thornless' Identification?

This question is probably best answered by Kim, but please anyone with particular knowledge about this one, please comment.

I have had ‘Basye’s Thornless’ for several years, given to me by Mr. Ralph Moore, and have wonder if it is ‘Commander Gillette’, or ‘Basye’s Legacy’. My plant has smoother sepals than the ‘Basye’s Legacy’ photo shown on HMF. It has lots of anthers, and the pollen when released appears very white. The pink seems lighter than the photos on HMF for ‘Commander Gillette’.

Ten years ago, I used it in crosses both ways with ‘Scarlet Moss’ to check for which trait was most dominant. ‘Basye’s Thornless’ produced about 20 seeds per hip while ‘Scarlet Moss’ only produced 9-10 per hip. I found that 1/3 to 1/2 of the seedlings bloomed in the first year both ways. I have begun using it again and am curious what it is that I really have. Also, is one (‘Commander Gillette’, or ‘Basye’s Legacy’) better than the other?

Thanks so much for any input!

Jim, EVERY rose I have encountered, from every source, attributed as either Basye’s Thornless, Commander Gillette, 65-626, 77-361 or the one Paul Zimmerman and I christened “Basye’s Legacy”, which was sent by Dr. Basye personally to Clair Martin at The Huntington and personally attributed as 77-361, ALL are the SAME rose.

I met David Neumeyer (I hope I spelled his name correctly!) through Garden Web a number of years ago. He had visited Dr. Basye and Basye handed him a sucker of a plant which he personally identified as Commander Gillette. David was moving and feared losing the plant so I asked him to send material to Carolyn at Sequoia. She rooted it and it is IDENTICAL to the plant someone had given Ralph some years earlier and identified as “Basye’s Thornless”.

It doesn’t matter who calls whatever, what, I have never encountered any plant called either Commander Gillette, Basye’s Thornless, or either code number which has been even the slightest bit different from each other. The only two which I would expect to be properly named, because Dr. Basye personally identified them, would be David’s Commander Gillette and the Huntington’s 77-361. Both are identical to each other in every detail I can discern.

Because there were the Thornless and Commander Gillette out there, and the one from The Huntington had been identified as 77-361, Paul and I decided it needed a proper name, so we called it Basye’s Legacy. You can’t tell it from any of the others as there are apparently no differences between any of them. I certainly can’t see it and I grew David’s, The Huntington’s and the older Thornless side by side in Newhall for quite a few years and they all looked like a trio of the same plant. I have no doubt there were originally two different plants of CG and 77-361, but whichever the one we currently have is, no matter what they’re called, they’re all the same rose. I guess only DNA testing is going to determine which they all are.

I have a photocopy of the accession card from The Huntington which states their rose was 77-361 identified by Dr. Basye. It was labeled in The Study Plot, where it grew beside The Probable Amphidiploid, as “Basye’s Thornless”. Dr. Basye had sent both roses to The Huntington and written in his ARS articles that budwood would be made available to any breeders who found them interesting for a small contribution to the library. I had read of them in those articles and found them in The Study Plot, so I propagated them to spread them around before anything happened to them. Clair told me in all the years they’d been there (about six or so by that time), no one had ever inquired about them. Until I brought them Basye’s Purple and Blueberry, they were the only two of his roses to have grown there. I knew of the anticipated development of the hill where The Study Plot grew and that the only thing preventing it was money. I worked feverishly to replicate everything which grew there to get them “out there” while I had the opportunity. The new Chinese Pavillion now stands on that entire area. I have no idea what happened to all the roses, but I doubt they were put anywhere else.

Hi Kim,

Thank you for the explanation of your experiences. Certainly the plant that I have is “very strong” genetically, in that many of its seedlings look just like it.

So do they all have the lighter pollen, long tapering sepals, tight clusters of buds, and long internode distances? The ‘Basye’s Legacy’ photo shown on HMF that you uploaded shows sepals with apparent more glandular elements than what I see on my specimen. My plant’s sepals appear smoother. I took some photos and will try to upload them in the next day or so.

What is your experience with the seedlings? What percentage are repeat blooming when crossed with modern roses?

Thanks!

Yes, short stems, bunched, clustered flowers; light pollen which sheds long before the sepals begin to open. The glandular quality is going to vary a bit from climate to climate. I’ve noticed it increased when I moved my plant from Santa Clarita to Encino. The heat here is less (a little!), humidity often higher and much less cold. (The plant I have is the original rooted piece of The Study Plot plant I rooted back in the mid eighties.) Tiny seeds which germinate rather well and develop into tiny, weak seedlings which are 99.9% selfs no matter how early you try to pollinate them. I’ve had many once flowering seedlings, and a few which flowered nearly immediately, Lynnie being the most notable. Indian Love Call is completely thornless with autumn foliage, great fertility and excellent health. Dottie Louise, which appears to be extinct, I can’t find anyone who grows it, was the first repeat flowering one.

The Anne Harkness X Legacy cross made many seedlings. All were large shrubs, all once flowering and all but Indian Love Call were quite thorny. Loving Touch made very thorny, mildewy seedlings except for the one which took seven years to flower. It was healthy and thornless and was discarded after fewer than a dozen individual flowers in ten years. Anna Legacy was the only repeat flowering seedling from its cross. I didn’t keep track of how many seedlings there were. If they were too prickly, showed disease or didn’t flower the first year, I usually dumped them as there were far too many to maintain at the time.

It’s been very interesting studying the difference Legacy genes make in the Fedtschenkoana crosses. The original ones were Orangeade X Fed. Dottie Louise was Orangeade X Legacy, so I can study how adding those genes alters the characteristics. I’m now raising Lynnie X Fedtschenkoana to see how adding Golden Angel to the mix alters things.

I didn’t keep track of what percentages were repeaters, thornless, or whatever. I paid more attention to which parents provided seedlings I wanted to retain. I would strongly suggest using it as a pollen parent whenever possible.

Hi Jim,

As strange as it sounds, I can actually weigh into this discussion from Australia :slight_smile:

Quite a few years back now Don was kind enough to send me a bag of excellent rose seeds. Among them were open pollinated ‘Commander Gillet’ seeds. They didn’t germinate overly well for me but I ended up with about 8 seedlings. I still have 4 or 5 of them now. All of them totally thornless. In this time I have never seen a flower on any of them and they have stayed smallish (mostly). Paul Barden advised me to cull like crazy because in his experience ‘Commander Gillet’ seedlings tend to be slow starters and runty. All 8 of the seedlings I originally had grew quite well and got no mildew or black spot and I thought Australia might just agree with them more than elsewhere. After their first year they went into the ground to grow and they have mostly remained small. The largest one, however, puts out 2-3ft lax canes each season that I leave in the hope that it will respond as though pegged and produce many laterals… but it never does. None of them have formed what I would call a ‘tidy’ bush. I’m guessing that there is either an extended, rugosa-like juvenile phase before flowering and eventual repeat kicks in, or they are all going to be once-flowering (or not at all). I’m happy either way because they still look good and they are totally smooth without a even a hint of a prickle anywhere. Their only vice here, and I know you are not going to like this, is downy mildew. I’m afraid all the remaining seedlings get a healthy dose of it in the cooler spring months here every year. I don’t like the way it affects them either, though I guess I really should be thankful. When downy hits here it causes the characteristic scorch marks on the leaves but instead of killing the leaf off completely the plant somehow manages to live with it and retain the foliage, scorch-and-all, right through the season, only dropping them in Autumn as they are now. I think they’ve been here 4 years now and I’m hopeful of getting flowers next spring. If I don’t I’m going to dig them all out the following winter and send them to good friend of mine in Goulburn, NSW, to see if he can get them to flower there in his climate where the summers are longer and hotter. I guess the runtiness that I’ve seen Kim and Paul talk about may be something that reveals itself over an extended period of time as well as at germination and the small ones I’ve got (under a 1ft tall) are the embodiment of this. They grow well enough… they just don’t build. Then I also read the Kim doesn’t use it as a seed parent for this reason… which also makes sense.

In the same year Viru sent over some open pollinated ‘88-390’ seeds from a Basye-line containing ‘Commander Gillet’ and they have proven to be repeaters and thornless with very similar features to the ‘Commander Gillet’ seedlings. Their growth is lower and more spreading and I think they will be useful in breeding thornless groundcover roses. As you say, the features seem to be passed on strongly. I currently have OP hips on my ‘88-390’ seedling that anyone (in Australia) is welcome to try if they want. There aren’t many but it would be a start. I feel these will actually be of more use to me than the op ‘Commander Gillet’ seedlings as they are also completely smooth, they don’t seem to be affected by downy mildew, powdery mildew or black spot, and they are proving to be quite self fertile… I’m hoping that translates into good general fertillity.

There is one other strange thing I have noticed about these CG seedlings that I have never seen on any other rose. They have the most unusual roots! They are good strong looking roots but they are pinky/red in colour and thick and fleshy like the roots of an orchid, branching off a main root like subterranean Cattleya roots. They remind me of epiphyte roots! On the most vigorous of the remaining seedlings I pulled out a weed that was growing up through it and the weed fought back with uncharacteristic fervour. When it gave way it brought with it a massive rootball exposing about half of the seedlings roots. I nearly fell over with shock because I saw this great mass of thick (4mm) pink roots branching off from the main roots and thought I was about to be invaded by the biggest sucker army that I’ve ever seen. I covered them up thinking I could dig them all up when they appeared to make pots of them to pass around and I waited and waited and waited and 2 years later still haven’t seen a single sucker. Either they are going to pop up 50m away in some random location or they weren’t suckers but just strange looking roots.

I will be great to eventually start working with these seedlings. I have plans to integrate them with your hulthemia seedlings, Jim.

Basye wrote that he’d used all but one of the “Bulls” to create black spot resistance. He said, were he to do it again, he would have included Wichurana in the mix, then raised selfs to fix the thornless character and work forward from there for repeat. I wonder how including his Thornless Wichurana would work into this? I just haven’t done it, too many “balls in the air”.

I forgot about “Softlegs”, the Softee X Legacy cross which was a neat, healthy, bushy, continuous flowering plant in Santa Clarita. Perhaps Robert Rippetoe still has it as I culled it due to rust once I moved the roses from Santa Clarita to Encino. I couldn’t keep it clean and I don’t spray for any reason. I know it was fertile and he raised some seedlings from it. I didn’t.

What you choose to cross Legacy with makes a world of difference. I’ve liked the results of it with minis best of all. They’ve tended to be more dwarf, bushy, incessantly flowering plants. Using Ralph’s minis has helped keep the thornless character best as his are great for thornlessness. Much of that came through Little Darling and his selection seemed rather skewed toward that trait.

I’d chosen Torch of Liberty because it contained a diluted form of Wichurana; contained Orangeade which produces larger flowers with very saturated pigments; and was marvelously healthy in Santa Clarita. Lynnie came through exactly as I’d expected (hoped!) and is the most “engineered” seedling I’ve been fortunate to raise. I wanted to make sure the result would root easily, grow well own root, and Paul Zimmerman told me years ago that not only did she have remarkable health and cold hardiness, even in New Hampshire and where she’s been grown in Europe, the plant flowers at a very young, small size.

The only disease I’ve encountered on either Lynnie or Indian Love Call is slight rust on foliage from the previous year which hadn’t been shed because the winter was too mild to force them to shed the leaves (both are fairly deciduous, which seems to maintain their health). Otherwise, no black spot, which agrees with the many reports Paul Zimmerman received from around the country about her black spot resistance; absolutely no mildew anywhere and no rust except for the few instances found on pervious year’s foliage. Downy isn’t generally an issue here, to the best of my knowledge, so I’m not sure how resistant she would be to that.

If Legacy flowers this year, which seems a big “if” due to the severe eating it suffered last year from the rodents, I hope to cross it with minis healthier in this climate, most notably, Pink Petticoat. If Torch of Liberty, with its issues in a more humid climate, can produce something as decent as Lynnie, what might something even healthier here produce?

This past season I tried Basyes Legacy as pollen on a small number of varying thorn level and shrub size but good seed producers, and got approx 50% germination, resulting in 165 seedlings. The healthiest, prettiest (just based on good looking green leaves, nice branching, and almost zero disease) seedlings came from Cafe Ole. None of these have bloomed yet, but almost all of the Basyes Legacy have taken more than the usual time for first bloom. One of these has very fine foliage, very different from the rest, and when I moved these into a short day shade area to see how much they would tolerate, the fine foliage one did get some mildew and the rest are still green and wonderful. Several of the Lynn Anderson X BL cross did bloom, with the results being semi-double, lavender or cerise toned, with several of the offspring having quite a few thorns, and being susceptible to mildew, and most were really tall and non-branching. The Lynn Anderson x BL cross probably had the highest Number of mildew susceptible seedlings. A Gemini cross has produced the most tall, vigorous, only one with thorns, no blooms yet, several sprawling (but almost identical in looks to the uprights) with hugely vigorous roots. A cross with a MoondancexBStreisand seedling actually produced the largest seedling I have this yr-a gigantico!, but every one has been thornless, probably 50% of these have bloomed, single red or cerise, nicely branching, some look to be groundcovers, one has 4-5" across flowers, and these have been actively reblooming with a fast repeat. Most of this cross has been healthy, bloomed early, (except for the ginormous one) and remain thorn free. Carefree Beauty x BL did not produce many seeds, and they have mildewed somewhat, and I noticed that two are budded. A cross with Rt 66 produced 46 seeds with 100% germ., and I have culled a number of those for being non-vigorous, mildewed, and not thriving. A couple of that cross did bloom, with carmine to purple single flowers. I have a note on one (can’t remember the bloom) that the bloom was semi double and nicely shaped. The rest are still to young or have been culled. I also used Sequoia Ruby x Indian Love Call in the form of 34-06-05 from Paul Bardon, which is a Basyes Legacy derivative on most of the same crosses. These were extremely mildew resistant, but rust is a definate problem in maybe up to half of them, but they did have the ability to express more color and shape in their offspring, with mostly very nice shapes to the plants so far, and a few have really good repeat bloom already.

Hmmm… seems like a “long haul” type adventure for the OP BLegacy (or WHATEVER they are) seedlings I have… David M did ya get 'em in the mail?

Well, just to make a liar out of me, Legacy had a fully open, nearly spent flower on it today. The ONLY one I can find any evidence of so far.

How long can I expect to typically wait for my OP x Basye’s Legacy seedlings to flower from germination (aka thornless / Commander Gillette…WATEVA ya wish to call 'em)?

George,

I will attempt to answer this, but I haven’t waited long enough for all of my Basyes legacy crosses to flower to be really accurate. last yr I attempted 15 different crosses with Basyes Legacy, and 12 of them took. Several of them were all real losers, producing weak small, poorly rooted seedlings that mildewed or rusted, but I have had good bloom results with about 4-5 of these crosses. In all but one of the crosses, some of them bloomed-there were quite a few seedlings, so I am not talking about 4-5 viable seedlings, but rather mostly 10-20 vigorous seedlings in each cross, and in a few there were more. I’m assuming your OP’s were not created in a vacuum and might as well be crosses, just unknown. Several of the crosses did produce seedlings that just want to grow (and grow, etc.) I am assuming at this point that these are going to bloom next yr, or the next. There are a few (I noted 3 today) that are tall, and are just starting to bud up-I believe these sprouted in Dec. and Jan., so they are approx 6 mo+. Several have bloomed in the last 2-3 weeks that were 4-5 months old. Many of the taller and sprawley seedlings don’t look like they wil bloom this yr, along with one stocky, shiny leafed, approx. 2+ft tall seedling that does not look like the others, but I’m pretty sure it is a legacy seedling just because it is not blooming yet, and it has sibling seedlings that have bloomed large cherry red singles. Most of the Legacy seedlings that have bloomed so far have had lighter brighter green leaves that have not been as large and spaced so far apart as the ones that haven’t bloomed. I have one set of offspring from Lynn Anderson, that were really large leafed, bloomed with lavender to magenta-ish flowers, and mostly mildewed and had thorns. This is the only offspring that mostly had thorns, and this much mildew. the others seem quite healthy, I am potting up about a dozen in quart pots, and hopefully they will bloom next yr. Of the blooms, I have 3 that were pink singles, a number that have been some shade of fuchsia to magenta, and quite a few cherry reds ,purples and one true red. Many of the 5-6 mo. old seedlings are now getting woody, so that is the reason I think they won’t bloom until maybe next yr., but they might surprise me come fall. By this time next yr. I’ll probably know more, and hopefully someone else who has grown out a few batches will have more to say.

Hi Jackie,

Thanks for your highly interesting and detailed reply, it is appreciated.

Because my Basye’s Legacy are all OP, I remember things written here by others that such OP are almost certainly all selfs.

Is that correct??

If most of these are selfs, I am worried they are going to take a year or even more to flower… ummmm !!!

ie. I am worried there is no double dose of repeat flowering genes in many of the Basye’s Legacy selfings?

In selfs, I doubt it. I remember only one self which flowered its first season. As for hybrids of it, I’ve had them flower anywhere from a few weeks after germination to seven years after. Indian Love Call flowered its second year as did all of its siblings. Yet, Suntan Beauty X Indian Love call flowered shortly after germination and continued repeating like a mini. They’re flowering now, as is Indian Love Call. The DLFED are flowering, and DLFED4, the repeat flowering one is finally coming in to its own, flowering the heaviest it ever has. The ones which have flowered earliest with the best repeat have been mini X Legacy crosses.

I have looked at the lineage for Basyes legacy a number of times and am aware of the Rosa moschata var. abysinnica Crépin but now that I have about two dozen big tall sprawling seedlings, I am amazed by how much the leaves and growth style of these seedlings resemble R.m. var. abysinnica Crepin, for the most part. Where do the small (very small) seedlings come from?

Small and very very slooowwww to get started!!!

This one must be at least 3 weeks old, it has an extremely delicate almost “lifeless” nature to it (many of its siblings have died from damping off no matter what I did to save them…maybe it was the paper toweling I used in the 5 month cold stratification):

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Here is one just emerging out of the mix (seen as a brown/black dot @ centre of picture), note it is smaller than some of the smaller sized perlite grains:

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