This is the weekend for the Great Rosarians of the World at The Huntington. Everything looks terrible, mostly due to the time of the year and the awful weather swings and a year’s worth of rain in two weeks. Being a public garden here, they can’t spray much of anything.
Amazingly, THE cleanest rose in the entire main rose garden is La Marne! It will mildew when not happy, but the three plants of this, and ONE Miss Lowe, were nearly perfect, even full of flower. No, they’re not ringers, just replaced to look good. Amazing. Kim
‘La Marne’ looks good for me now too. Mine has never mildewed. I’m sorry to hear it’s prone. I wish it didn’t retain it’s petals so long.
The sad part is the sheer lack of progeny from it, despite the fact that it comes from one of the most used lines ever. There are about 10 plants of this at the Sylvania campus of Portland Community College up in the west hills. Theyre always in bloom, always clean, and always pretty. Sometimes the petals are spotty though, but its an older rose, so its to de expected. It really is the best of both worlds (tea and multiflora). I’d love to see it crossed with hardy yellow diplids and tetraploids. I think more than just purples and pinks can be had with it, especially since its a line breed of Safrano. I’d love to see a hardy, die-back resistant landscape rose with tea colors.
Sweet Nothings is bred from it and is outstanding here. I’ve been impressed that crossing it with Comtesse du Cayla is needed since seeing the two of them grown beautifully at The Sacramento Heritage Cemetery last year. Both are found frequently in the Gold Country.
Of the Polyanthas and Hybrid Musks I have it has consistently been the cleanest of them. It
I have some seedlings using it as pollen parent now from last season. I’ve already noted mildew on a few of them that will be culled.
Kim, you want to back cross it to it’s reported pollen parent, ‘Comtesse du Cayla’?
He can call it ‘Small Town, Beer Goggles’
Crossing either Chevy Chase or Happy to a red tea would be interesting, but I do not know enough about teas to know if red + true diploid tea exists. Maybe one of ya’ll down south do.
Kathy Zuzek’s ‘Lena’ is a seedling of ‘La Marne’ and has proven to have strong horizontal black spot resistance, much like ‘La Marne’ seems to have from field trials even though we didn’t include it in our laboratory study. In our recent black spot paper in HortScience, ‘The Fairy’ consistently had the slowest growing lesions (smallest diameters after a set time) and ‘Lena’ came in second across the three races. ‘Lena’ is more cold hardy than ‘La Marne’ which is great. The flowers are smaller than ‘La Marne’. ‘Lena’ is a confirmed diploid and sets seeds easily. Vance used ‘Lena’ in his Ph.D. to look at combining ability for lesion length for black spot and ‘Lena’ was good at transmitting slowed lesion growth (relatively smaller diameters) to its offspring.
David
I almost want to say ‘Crepuscule’ is generally the cleanest rose in my garden during the year, it tries to be evergreen as well, but frost comes and shrivels up all the leaves/younger new growth. It really is a gorgeous plant, I’m going to buy a second as my current plant might be in slightly too much shade for it’s liking, very ill placed.
Mine has yet to really bloom though, it’s taken it’s time since 2006 to build up in size. Again I’m going to try a second one, see if I can find a better, hotter, sunnier spot.
Max… ‘Crepuscule’ strikes easily from cuttings and grows beautifully on its own roots
No, I don’t want to back cross it to the Comtesse. I want to cross the Comtesse with Mutabilis and the three Mutabilis hybrids from Lens I have rooting. I’ve used La Marne with the DLFED hybrids to see what can come from that. Once I have the Mr. Bluebird X DLFEDs going, I’ll consider her with those, too.
Out back, the cleanest plant period is one of Sean McCann’s, Smiling Jean. I received it from Ashdown to test and thought I’d pass it along to a friend of my sister’s whose name is Jean. She can’t be bothered with anything that isn’t an animal which deposits “goodies” in her house, so that didn’t happen.
While not thrilled with it, it looks like it’s out of Armada to me and that isn’t a rose I have ever been able to warm up to. But, there is absolutely NOTHING on its foliage. It looks like plastic. It’s flowering and has never set hips. I haven’t tried pollinating it. The stamen are too short to self pollinate. HMF lists it as highly resistant to all three major fungi. From the looks of it here, I believe it.
Link: www.helpmefind.com/gardening/l.php?l=2.60389
Kim, ‘Smiling Jean’ does look like it could be out of ‘Armada’.
Why don’t you ask Sean about it?