Unfortunately Euphrates is showing spots of powdery mildew in my relatively humid warm coastal climate…It looks like warm dry (low humidity) climates are not necessarily the only places where this moldy menace can take hold in roses.
I thought Euphrates was immune to PM for some reason, I really don’t know where I got that idea from?!
I am disappointed, but hey that’s life.
Don’t be… when starting something like this you need to work with what you’ve got and just try to work around it… for instance, I’m going to try ‘Euphrates’ on my ‘Baby Love’ seedling because PM and spot don’t phase it… just means you need to try different things cos beggers can’t be choosers 
Chuck it on clinophylla and see what happens…
I wouldnt worry about it. And, yeah, the notion of PM resistance is unfounded since Euphrates it the product of a long line of very mildew-prone roses (hello, The Fairy and Ballerina!) and a desert weed that likely never saw fungal spores, lol. I would not think much of the mildew. Think in terms of it being a constraint to consider.
Selecting mates is so very, very difficult with this line of breeding because the constraints are so numerous.
Jim was wise to use roses like Baby Love in his tetraploid work because it can pass on average mildew resistance. The basic Baby Love foliage, from my experience, is passed on in a third of its seedlings. Baby Love also passes on singles and color saturation. It is not so great for internode spacing though, which is also a persica flaw.
I know, Baby Love and some of its F1/subsequent generations appear to have been a popular idea for some breeders to add to their mix, hoping to minimize disease.
I am not trying to be difficult, but I actually have come to pretty much dislike mini leaves and mini flowers.
I had a Baby Love F1 here, and got rid of it only last week for those very reasons.
It is all very interesting…without such “obstacles/challenges” I guess rose breeeding would not be rose breeding…lol
Oh, I dislike miniatures too, with some exceptions. I like some of the micros and I like some like Rose Gilardi. They look pretty nice, especially near rocks of any random size. My only point was that he found a valid solution that works with the really annoying constraints.
True!
George,
I think John Moe said in an earlier thread or the bulletin that he and his wife found in crossing a mini with a HT for example, you get more of the larger shrubs if the mini is used as the pollen parent in the cross and more minis if the mini is used as the mother plant.
As to Baby Love, I had two and for a few years, they were totally impervious to any disease. Then they both succumbed to disease and are now barely alive. The disease seems to affect the canes as well as the leaves. Unfortunately it is extremely susceptible to a particular strain of BS though resistant to the others.
Simon is right,this idea to create a universally disease resistant rose is somewhat too idealistic; breed for healthy in your general area- Jack Harkness said that the English bred red HT Ena Harkness did better in Tasmania than any where else and there was a HT (name slips me right now) that took all the prizes in Australia so that the other exhibitors wouldn’t compete!
Work with what you have and select for what works for you.
I am not crazy about minis either except for the larger ones.
My thoughts for the day, LOL!
Jim
And yet ‘Ena Harkness’ is nowhere to be seen here
All roses grow well here… it’s rose heaven on a stick 
Simon,
This was from an older book by Jack Harkness; at that time, Ena Harkness was very popular and a big step forward in breeding( shortly after WW2). I believe, to be more specific, he said the largest Ena Harkness bloom grown was by a nun in Tasmania.
You are lucky; that’s how it was for me when I lived in Laguna Hills, California for 2 years. The roses thrived like weeds: no blackspot, no mildew and a tiny bit of rust for 2 weeks in the spring on one or two, and no Japanese Beetles.
Jim
Michael, when you mention internode problems from ‘Baby Love’ what do you mean? This is my little one (link) and it’s internode length, so, far is very small… almost too small… is this what you meant?
try that again…
Oh, no George! Euphrates mildews like crazy. Even the flower petals mildewed in Newhall, CA. It hasn’t bloomed in Encino yet. Mildew is a chronic problem with Hulthemias.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but one of the medal winners at the “prestigious” Rose Hills Rose Trials was Zary’s Walking on Sunshine. In the Exposition Park AARS no spray, hand water, NO care garden in Los Angeles, it was actually one of the best of all the roses, period. I mention it because it has at least a double dose of miniature in it, Moore’s Sequoia Gold and Baby Love, yet it is a big rose. You can go both ways with minis, and they have been the bridges to stripes, moss, crested sepals, increased vigor, improved health, easier propagation, increased flower production and better shaped growth and plant size. Many of them are pretty lame, IMHO, but the good ones are really great tools.
Oh, no George! Euphrates mildews like crazy<<<<
Oh dear, it looks like I’m gonna have another Christmas tree with snow situation here in the middle of my summer!
Get out the plastic ornaments … and save all of the pollen possible
Nigel Hawthorn is disease free here btw. It is also probably the most sterile of the bunch. The pollen failed, I think. I’ll know around Thanksgiving when I see my garden again. I really did not try hard enough though. Its a really beautiful plant but it only blooms once. It’d probably be a real good sell if it was repeat blooming and easier to propagate. Its definitely drought tolerant and it makes a very cute 2.5’ ball of dwarf rugosa foliage. The flower color is like rustic water paintings. It is such an odd critter for a rose. I actually find the overall appearance as touched with romanticism, but not like in the Shakespeare, etc. sappy puke stuff. Its like the jewel of some long gone Turkish or Ottoman Empire or something, lol.
Yet… it was bred in the UK from bits and pieces of Japan and Iran, haha.
Nice!
On a more (or less) serious note…(the coffeee is strong here ATM)…
If any one can engineer a NO-DISEASE rose for all climates (or aspires to engineer that) good luck to them. I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime.
(BTW, I wish someone could explain to me the trick of how to inseret slanting font in the body of these messages, so I don’t put in capitals all the time LOL).
PM is just one of those fungal afflictions that actually gets me the closest to a shovel. I had to negotiate with my hand into not pulling out Euphrates yesterday, as an example…hence I wrote on here instead, as therapy to save myself from doing something to the plant I would later regret…LOL.
gets up to make the fifth coffee of the morning
(engineer a NO-DISEASE rose)= a plastic one. I don’t think they have the full size bush yet.
Off topic to the thread, except for the Ena Harkness and Tasmanian super performers…Is Dame Edith Helen still considered a killer there in Australia as it once was? I’ve grown it here in California and always wondered how it could have been considered such an outstanding variety, even trying to conjure up 1930s eyes. Supposedly, it is SO good there, there were specific classes in which it had to compete so it wouldn’t knock out all the competition.
Maybe great in the spray and kill everything that moved (or didn’t move) regime that was/is used.
Ok.
My Euphrates plant is shutting down…it has lost 80%+ of its leaves due to PM, and some of the new growth is wilting. I am now on a daily basis having to pluck out dried curled older leaves, and pinching out growing tips that are covered in PM and browning off, or else wilting.
The long dangly new branches it has put out this season are almost entirely without leaves, the only leaf that remains on them now has PM on it, and is juvenile leaf located on the tips of these canes.
Brief cultural history of this specimen:
It was purchased bare root, budded, in our southern hemisphere winter (this past August 2010), and has been in a large pot in the usual potting mix plus added sheep manure (very well composted), and sitting in a morning-till-midday direct sun aspect (currently receiving ~5 hours of direct sun) all that time. Initially it grew out fast, healthy and even produced 6 flowers, from one of the stems…and then not long after that flowering finished, it got obvious PM, which has progressed to the current state.
The weather had gotten very wet for many weeks around the time this decline started.
There is more than plenty of ventilation (often very windy) in the postition where it has sat all along.
The large pot it sits in, has been watered religiously, every day.
I was just about to prune all the new dangly branches back, but something told me this may be the wrong thing to do. After all, leafless but green new growth that is many inches long, represents energy building for the plant, yes/no?? … and cutting it back will set it back globally at this warm point in my growing season, is that correct??
Very scorching hot days are not far away, of that I am very sure.
HELP REQUIRED!