I was on help me find looking up diferent roses when under Darlow’s Enigma it suggested that some authorities think that it is Cascadia. Anyone have any thoughts about this?
Secoundly I got Op pollinated seed from Darlow’s Enigma and Jeanne de Monfort recently. It has not been stastified do I have to wait till fall to plant these?
“do you mean op seedling of something related to nastarana”
Yes, it looks very much like ‘Nastarana’. It’s been suggested it’s an op seedling of that cultivar.
I do really like the idea of breeding with some of the hybrid musk. Some of them have very interesting parentage. And for some reason i really like the plant form of some.
Has anyone obtained anything from Darlow’s Enigma that has its good qualities AND has any serious color?
The possibility that “Darlow’s Engima” is Captain Thomas’s ‘Cascadia’ has been repeated to me by several sources, some of whom credit the attribution to Mike Darlow himself. An experienced and capable rosarian from Portland, Oregon, gave me this version:
“Interestingly enough, several years ago, more like 30 to be exact, I was visiting a rose lover in Eugene who had a white mountain covering the entire fence. Identical to DE, he told me then the rose was there for years, his grandmother planted [it], and he thought it was called “Cascades” or “Cascading” because of the way it draped itself around things. I looked high and low for a rose by that name, and of course I could not find anywhere anything remotely close to what he was talking about…
I mentioned [this to a nurseryman] some years back this after I tried unsuccessfully to find the farm where I first saw that rose, and he said the original one that Mike Darlow took his cuttings from came from somewhere in the Willamette Valley, either from Salem or Eugene or the close vicinity.
Now, roses in Oregon develop their own brand of “sturdiness” if you please. If the anecdotal references are even mildly correct, that rose lived in Oregon for some 100 [?70] years at least. The “trunk” of the one I saw way back in 1970something was clearly about 5 inches in caliper, thick as a young lemon tree’s trunk, with tons of clearly unattended canes flying in all directions of assorted and larger and smaller diameters. Without exaggerating it was a veritable mount of roses. I must add that I did not detect anything but a very faint fragrance, and since ours once in a while has a waft that kills you but more often than not is just a pleasant, nothing to write home about fragrance, I would suspect by all physical aspects that we are talking about the same rose here.”