Bearing in mind that the cresting trait and the mossing trait are very different creatures, as Jim has suggested…
Ralph was of the opinion that mossing and thorniness characteristics were intimately linked, genetically. In other words, you couldn’t have mossing without a lot of prickles. If anyone had enough experience to come to any conclusions on this subject, it was Ralph. My own work has suggested that this is the case; I never got a mossed seedling that wasn’t also heavily prickled. Not once.
However, the cresting trait can appear on a plant that is not excessively prickly, and I would bet that the trait can persist in combination with thornlessness. Perhaps its time to cross ‘Crested Jewel’ and ‘Lynnie’?
As an aside, Moore’s ‘Bracteata Moss Climber’ has a unique trait: although extremely thorny, the thorns are curved at the tips, as if someone took a hammer to the prickles and bend the tips over! And so, you can handle the canes of this plant without doing a lot of damage to your skin. I suspect this is a modification of the thorn trait that could be passed on to offspring, making the Moss group a lot more user friendly. It is something I plan on exploring this year.
I remember the first time I saw the original seedling at Sequoia, already enormous. I thought the prickles were fascinating.
I’ve been handling cactus since I was a child so they didn’t really intimidate me. I carefully took some of the canes in hand and was delighted to find the prickles were as you suggest, bent over just far enough to be less menacing.
At that moment I also had the thought the characteristic could be taken further.
The big question is what to put it with? My original thought was to self it then select among the offspring line breed from there. It’s very possible as I’m sure you know.
We do often think alike. You work on that and I’ll work on smooth crests.
Yes I did mean Fakirs Delight. I am used to calling it the Bracteata Moss Climber as that is the name I knew it by originally. I have not grown selfsame of it but I agree that is as good a place to start as any. I suspect I have other mosses that do this as well, I just need to identify them.
‘Lemon Delight’ is certainly one of Ralph’s best mini mosses, and it is a charmer, to be sure. However, he made it quite clear in several of our chats that he felt ‘Lemon Delight’ itself had little to offer as a breeder, and that he was very lucky to get one hybrid (“Lemon D”) that enabled him to proceed with this line of breeding. He discouraged me from fiddling with ‘Lemon Delight’ and suggested giving ‘Paintbrush’ a try instead.
The plant listed in the link below might also be a worthwhile plant to explore in breeding, as it sets copious seed with ease. (I am sowing the first crosses using it this year) There is a rich orange sibling that is equally as generous with seed production and will be put to work in breeding this year. I will be putting ‘Fakir’s Delight’ on both.
I find it fascinating ‘Star Dust’ also descends from LD.
Sorry to change the subject but I noticed that Rob Byrnes did some work with LD. He hasn’t posted of late and yet he was quite active at one time. It makes me wonder why. Hoping he’s well.
I have ‘Heidi’ out in the garden somewhere. It has to be sprayed to stop Blackspot or it is leafless by June. I would never use it for breeding. I am underwhelmed by it. No vigor, nothing special about it, IMO.
“Ralph was of the opinion that mossing and thorniness characteristics were intimately linked, genetically. In other words, you couldn’t have mossing without a lot of prickles.”
What about roxburghii and laevigata armed fruits without added plant thorniness. Isn’t it here a possibility of disjunct “thorniness/mossing” of receptacle and plant inheritance?
Interesting point, Pierre. I see a bit of that in the Fedtschenkoana seedlings. The density of cane prickles doesn’t necessarily correspond to how bristly the hips are. They range from resembling moss roses to completely smooth.
Heidi for me is a no fuss rose for me. I’ve not used it at all, really, except for this year. But I think it’s just a pretty rose. It does get mildew in the moss, but that’s the case for most moss roses I’ve seen.
And many shrub roses descend from this rose. Even if I don’t use it, I would keep it because it’s very charming.
But I think I will make extensive crosses of it this year with Scarlet Moss.
Paul’s point is well taken about mossing being variable from stiff to soft depending on what you start with and what you cross it to.
However, I’m going to beat this horse a little more because I just realized something interesting about Lemon Delight as I was parsing through the ancestry of Condoleeza.
There are enough primary sources that discuss the mossing trait as having arisen twice, once in R. centifolia and once in R. damascena, and enough examples of both that it’s pretty certain that there were two original mutations.
We know from a 1984 study that the Centifolia type moss is a single, dominant trait. There are no studies that I am aware of that define the heritability of the Damask type moss but since Damask type mosses give both mossed and unmossed offspring pretty easily it seems also to be a single dominant trait.
We don’t know whether the Damask type mutation is identical to the Centifolia type mutation, nor whether or how the two types affect each other. I’m hoping to see for myself down the road but when I came across the lineage of Lemon Delight I just had to ask about it.
Lemon Delight was bred from a Centifolia type moss (Fairy Moss) crossed with a Damask type moss (Gold Moss). We do not know which type of moss Lemon Delight inherited, or if it inherited both types. We do know that it is heterozygous for whatever type(s) it has because it yields offspring that are not mossed.
None of the offspring of Lemon Delight that are listed at HMF give us a clue to which type(s) of moss it has, with the possible exceptions of Lemon D and Fakir’s Delight.
So, can someone please describe the mosses that these three roses have? Has anyone gotten soft-mossed offspring of these, or of Condoleeza?
‘Condoleezza’ certainly produces both soft and hard moss seedlings. I generally keep only the soft moss types, as these tend to be far more meavily mossed than hard moss types. I am inclined to think that hard mossing is partial expression of the gene, or perhaps expression of one copy of a mossing gene, where soft mossing is the expression of two copies of a mossing gene.
There have been many many more of both types, but these four come to mind right off the top.
I don’t use ‘Lemon Delight’ in breeding, since Ralph warned me off using it on several occasions He felt very lucky to have obtained “Lemon D” from it and suggested it was a one in a million seedling.
Yeah, I saw those but they all have Damask moss genes from the other parent so I figured they would all be hard mosses. The fact that two are soft is a strong indication that Lemon Delight has copies of both the Damask and Centifolia mossing genes.
