Do these hips look ripe?

Rose Growing
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I pollinated my Jacqueline du Pre rose with a mixture of pollen from other roses on 2nd July 2024 and cut the hip open today, 4th November 2024. So the hips have had 4 months to ripen. They have turned red. Do these seeds look ripe?

The pollen was a mixture from Peter Pan (a deep red miniature), Rosa chinensis Angel Wings, Nice Day (a miniature climber) and a single purple Rosa rugosa, and a single yellow rose. The remaining petals’ potpourri smelt amazing and were very pretty colours. I thought I could feel the pollen taking, and both of the 2 hips that I pollinated have ripened and each produced 6 seeds.

There are things that I love about Jacqueline du Pre, scent, early flowering and floriferous from May and still flowering in November, absolutely beautiful flowers. What I don’t like is that she gets blackspot, and I am not totally happy with her growth habit though I have got used to it. If it is the Rugosa pollen that has taken, then the disease resistance could be better and what I love about Rugosa apart from its disease resistance and toughness is its beautiful flowers, colour and scent. What I don’t like about Rugosa is its invasiveness and suckering, and low flower to bulk ratio, and that the flowers are short lived so what you end up with is a shrub with not many flowers that is trying to take over your garden.

If it is the Rugosa that has fertilised the Jacqueline du Pre, I would probably use the plant mainly for further hybridising to lessen the Rugosa invasive suckering, and increase the number of flowers, whilst keeping the disease resistance and wonderful colour, scent and beauty of the Rugosa flowers.

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“Seeds” and “hips” will vary in appearance from location to location and sometimes, season to season, however, what you picture LOOKS ripe from the flesh color and the seed appearances and, you’ve provided that hip well over the threshold of time it requires to mature so I vote “ya done good”! Fingers crossed for your success with them!

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Kim, have you also ever noticed differences in ripening time based on the mother cultivar? Anectdotally, for some time I have used ‘Sunsprite’ rather frequently, and she is always the last to show any signs of color to the hips. This year’s harvest, I had many hips over 150 days that were still green as grass.

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Another hip that I used the same pollen mixture on, except not its own pollen and I added pollen from Jacqueline du Pre. The mother is a rose with big yellow highly scented single flowers. The hip was smaller than those on Jacqueline du Pre as a mother, but had 13 seeds inside whereas Jacqueline du Pre’s 2 hips only had 6 seeds each.

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Hi Lee, I’ve not consciously paid attention to it but why not? I know I have to watch Minutifolia like a hawk as its hips ripen quite quickly to ready themselves to stick to some unsuspecting critter ambling by for distribution. For moderns, I either just notice the date pollinated or their coloring and harvest based upon what feels appropriate.

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