Thank you both, as always you never can get quite what you want
this year, my crosses on DdM failed, perhaps because of a heat wave, overfeeding, or a lack of maturity in the mother plant.
edit: one thing of note for people planning to use ddm is that in my garden it blooms very early relative to other antique and modern roses, which left me scrambling for pollen as i assumed i would have fresh material to work with during the bloom period.
however, I did manage to collect about 130 seeds from a mature specimen I had the good fortune to be near at the right time. this bush was in a bed with many other roses, but I’m assuming that the majority of the seeds were selfs. I’m wondering if it’s possible to recapture re-bloom in a selfed plant?
The petal count/flower structure of ‘Duchesse de Montebello’ really doesn’t lend itself to self-fertilization, so it’s much more likely that (most, if not all of) the seeds you harvested resulted from outcrossing.
Stefan
Ah, thank you. That would be even better. I’m trying to remember when I emasculated my plant how close together the pistil and stamens were, and I guess I thought it would be likely to self.
I am ‘a bit late to the ball’ - I am sorry about that. My story starts with me buying a rose labelled ‘Duchesse de Montebello’ (DM) in 2010. First later, after establishing contact with Rolf Sievers, things changed a bit. But first, for those of you who don’t know, Rolf Sievers passed away this summer. For me he was a mentor and a friend - a big loss. At the time we got in contact, I gave him all the details about my rose that he requested. The conclusion Rolf made was that my rose likely was ‘Small Maiden’s Blush’ (SMB) - a tetraploid albahybrid. And Rolf maintained that DM was a triploid China hybrid with SMB being the mother. I soon learned that the issue was quite contentious and discussions continue - even to this day. What has been sorely needed are molecular data. A SSR study of DM and a lot of other old garden roses was published in 2021 (in Sweedish: «Rosarvet i Nationella genbanken» Gustavsson & Moren) did not find any China specific markers in DM. A problem with that study in my opinion is the lack of a distinction between DM and SMB. According to Rolf Sievers, part of the problem is that the genuin DM is hard to find nowadays.