Brand new to rose breeding, what to begin with?

NOW, with the new enhancements on the Advanced Search, you can actually search whether a rose has been used as seed, pollen, or (once the finish fine tuning the selection) self seedling. Searching by ploidy is also now easier than previously. That $24 annual Premium Membership just became a whole lot more interesting!

Wonderful news, Kim! Thanks, Brian

An interesting query and illuminating responses which I found very interesting, having recently decided that an interesting hobby would be breeding roses here in the UK, something to do in my retirement that has possibly some relatively quick results compared to say fruit tree breeding which might have four to seven year crossing cycles with several more years evaluation periods.
One comment of the responders was to start slowly. David Austin wrote a short memoir on his start to breeding “as a hobby” and some of the results from his original crosses are quite surprising, with single flowered parents being used in crosses that achieved double flowered results.
My start was very slow, just sowing seeds from some self-set hips of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. As mentioned, the bees don’t get very far with the very double flowers, particularly as the pollen is shed by the time the flowers open so I assumed all my seedlings were selfings. This gave me a little insight into the parentage behind this variety, with some doubles, some singles, one very deep red colored and otherwise similar to a grandparent Chateau Clos de Vougeot, some straggly (climber?) and one very extremely double which I thought first of all might be useful for making very heavy petalled crosses in the future, but it seemed all the reproductive parts were turned into petals, so no use at all.
The one characteristic of all these selfed seedlings was the lack of vigor. However, for the following year I made a cross of Tess of the d’Urbervilles with another variety (HT)and one of the seedlings showed terrific vigor, which I will be taking forward another year at least to see what that amounts to.
The big bugbear is the germination. With growing outdoors without any protection the wild R.rugosa and polyantha types pop up like weeds from the middle of February onwards with a little bit of warmth (14C max) but most of the modern hybrids have hardly put in an appearance, although the weather is still cool. Perhaps without a strong warming signal the seeds g back into a second dormancy and I won’t get anything until next year? That would e a subject of interest to me

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I’ve found Carefree Beauty to be an incredibly easy seed parent, meaning that it accepts most pollen sources and has a really high germination percentage… many dependents of Carefree Beauty also carry this attribute… You will get a lot of pink seedlings just to warn you…

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And, where mildew and rust are problems, Carefree Beauty passes addiction to both on with glee. I’ve not grown it anywhere in Southern California where it was anything approaching “carefree” or “beauty”.

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Yes, knowing what will give you issues in your target breeding environment is important. In Ontario Carefree Beauty is clean, as it is across the environments for which it was developed, or until the races of rust and black spot shift in those environments…. While there is not much research done on rust resistance in roses, in Rosacea it looks like the resistance is the classic gene for gene. There is probably some horizontal resistance out there….

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