Greetings to all, I am a plant breeder based in Victoria Australia with previous experience as a Bearded Iris grower and breeding for 10-12 years, I have learned many things about plants, I’m into orchid breeding at the moment but I decided to give the Rose breeding a go after caring for them for over 20+ years with my mom and dad, I intend to breed tough stable vigorous disease resistant mini yellow white striped and separately blackish amethyst purple white striped Hulthemia eye blotched exhibition/florist/garden roses;
Does anyone have any advice on where to start and what roses to use for breeding?
Welcome, Benjamin! I hope that some folks from Australia will chime in, since they will know best what roses are available there. Your initial goals are quite ambitious. While I would certainly not want to dissuade you from trying, those color patterns in combination may not yet exist in roses, so it could be difficult for anyone to give you overly specific advice at the outset. If you stay open to all of the possibilities that open to you along the way, it could potentially be a long and winding but highly enjoyable journey.
Finding one or more good, healthy seed parents that you find fairly easy to grow and reliably raise seedlings from is probably the best place for you to start. Have you gotten to know any that are particularly good hip setters? If so, you can often check to see if they’ve been used before in breeding, and that might be a good clue. Learning to raise roses successfully from seed is an essential first step even if you have a good seed parent, and you will find many lengthy discussions about preferred methods on this forum. There is some information for beginners available from the RHA main page, too: https://rosebreeders.org/
The great majority of yellow roses, striped roses, miniature roses, dark purple roses, and roses with petal blotches tend be quite prone to blackspot in warm, humid regions, so if you don’t already know of some healthier options from your prior experience, you might want to look for varieties that are already recommended for your area. You might also seek out newer, healthier offerings from breeders like Kordes and Delbard to try. Even those varieties aren’t all equally good everywhere. Traits like striping and miniaturism can be relatively straightforward to breed for using existing varieties, but disease resistance is far more unpredictable and usually requires some combination of careful parent choices, large numbers of seedlings, and/or luck. Colors in general can be hit or miss, and looking at what has already been raised from a specific cultivar can be helpful. Good Rosa persica (Hulthemia) eye blotches can be very tricky to breed for. You’ll probably find the most information about useful parents for that goal by searching the forum right here (there have been fairly extensive discussions about them), and then cross-referencing with roses that are available in your country.
Needless to say, combining multiple of these traits together is orders of magnitude more difficult than getting any one by itself. Your instincts from years of growing and observing roses will be very helpful for ascertaining when you’ve raised something good, whether or not it adheres to all of your original goals. If you go where the roses take you, I think you’ll have a wonderful time!
Stefan
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Hi Stefan, thank you for reply, the goals I mentioned are idealistic and complex to achieve, I am ordering two hulthemia roses from a rose company which comes from the same rose breeder and should help my project plus I recently acquired flower carpet roses to cross with those hulthemias, I’m looking at some miniature roses and striped ones for my goal, I am still observing which roses set rose hips and eventually I will get some open pollinated rose hips so I can germinate grow flower them before making official initial crosses.
From Benjamin Evans.
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Hey Benjamin, in 2023 White Knock out was named the rose of the year for Australia. Although it is not very female fertile, it does make and ok pollen parent. I would recommend White Knock Out for disease resistance and compact habit traits.
Bryce Schoen
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Hello Bryce Schoen, the white knock out rose is something to consider thank you, I’ll keep it in mind should I try that particular rose, 
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