Looks like ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is featuring a fair bit in people’s crosses. This is one that I want to use as well but can’t buy a plant anywhere!!! So I’ve ordered a plant of ‘Wild Rover’ instead to see if I can work with this. I was thinking of using ‘Route 66’ but thought this was a different purple to R in B and not quite what I was looking for. ‘Wild Rover’ seems more like. My roses are still pretty much leafless though as we are not quite in Spring yet. On the other hand I have a load of seeds in the fridge now that should be ready to germinate sometime soon. They are all OP hips collected at The National Rose Garden in Longford in Tasmania (Australia) and OP hips collected from ‘Mary Rose’ in my own garden (for some reason she produced masses of OP hips). The others are OP R. pimpinellifolia, Frau Dagmar Harstrup, Westerland, Schneezwerg (Snow Dwarf) and one other whose label I lost. Looking forward to Schneezwerg actually, especially in light of recent discussions about using species or near species roses as its parents are R. rugosa x R. beggeriana.
One things I was going to ask on here was last season a plant that set a large number of OP hips was a Delbard called ‘Maurice Utrillo’. It is a red/white/yellow striped rose (this is one of my flowers from last season: http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s208/Simonauv/Garden/known%20roses/Maurice_Utrillo3-1.jpg). The parentage is not listed on HMF. I was wondering whether anyone knew anything about this rose and whether the stripes would be inheritable or caused by something else like a virus or being a chimera??? I didn’t harvest the hips because they didn’t seem to want to change colour and stayed big fat and green even though I left them on the bush right through from Spring to mid-winter. It formed lots of OP hips though so it might be worth using if it’s any good as it is apparently pretty fertile.
