Euphrates as a Pollinator

General Discussion
41

I’m in Maryland, but I hate asking for cuttings of something I’m only curious to try! I’d really be interested to know if anyone has had other results or experience with it first, aside from Easy on the Eyes. I had hoped for a while that Burling might have it to offer again, since she must have been a source for EFY at one point (according to HelpMeFind), but it hasn’t been on any of her availability lists since I’ve been requesting them and I suppose that it may no longer be in her collection.

Stefan

42

Eyes For You, pollen is ok (viable but would be useful it would release more of it), it’s ability to set seed seems to vary for unknown reasons (climate? who knows). I’ve had it for ~5 years, it set seed for the first time this past season (southern hemisphere) and even then just 3 hips despite many many flowers. I know people who’ve had eyed results from it as seed parent so it is possible but ease of use may vary.

I have seedlings of Carmen Wurth x Eyes For You, many eyed, blackspot resistance average (but to be fair, both parents get a bit here). It’s a viable parent but on the same token I’ll ditch it as soon as something better/easier comes along in it’s general colour.

43

@Plazbo,
Thanks for that information about the Interplant Hulthemias! I went and read the reference page and it does seem possible that Euphrates could be an ancestor. Very interesting! I’ll give one of them a try in the fall when bare root season starts again.

I have Eyes for You and Raspberry Kiss. RK is very pretty but I wish the petals were better attached to the flower. They fall off at the slightest brush of the hand or as soon as the wind picks up even a little. Eyes for You doesn’t have this problem. Neither has had any disease here so far.
I was happy to see Raspberry Kiss accepted pollen from Jean de Luxembourg and hips are starting to form, but now reading the comments by @pacificjade and @plazbo about low germination I fear I may have wasted my time. Oh well…

The latest Tantau Hulthemias from 2020 look really good, AND they have good/strong fragrance which isn’t something I see often in Hulthemias. These aren’t all listed on HMF but they are named Orienta Aladdin (a climber), Orienta Magnolia, Orienta Djamila, and I’m especially looking at Orienta Aylin which seems like a fragrant version of Tigris with better bloom form and glossy foliage.

44

Ooof. Those names wouldn’t see the light of day in stores. A nursery got sued some years back for abbreviating what is considered an ethnic pejorative. The wholesaler I worked for at the time was spared. Likely because I was a younger generation, I knew that was a commercial no no in the inventory list I managed that the taggers pulled to print from.

Burling still sells Eyes for You. I am not sure how frequently, but I’m being sent one. I was due one earlier, but was accidently sent Show Stopper. What an absolutely homely rose with perfect form and enough black spot to fill an oil barrel. Blue for You gets downy pretty badly here, so whatever happened between Blue For You and Easy on the Eyes is a miracle, because it had zero downy in this absolutely awful spring.

Bull’s Eye does not get black spot or downy here, but in its first year of acclimation, it will get some powdery. This seems to be common in larger roses where they petals tend to crisp. I imagine the require more water during blooming than their initial roots can aid with. I like it quite a bit, except for the overzealous plant habit.

I first saw Sweet Spot series in Lowes. They were all at hand level, so I looked at them closely. For whatever reason, they were sticky. I saw some black spot and mildew and took a huge pass. A year later, they were at Home Depot on the ground in pots similar to Flower Carpet series. Completely defoliated. I laughed and looked like a fool. 10/10 would do it again. What kind of wholesaler sends defoliated roses for sale? LOL

45

Thanks, I’ll stay on the watch for Eyes for You on Burling’s list! It sounds like it may take a bit of work to use in breeding, much like Easy on the Eyes, but maybe with slightly better fertility (thanks, Plazbo!). The recent note on HMF about its blackspot resistance does make me wonder what chance it might have here…

It’s good to know that Blue for You is a downy mildew magnet. It has definitely had a very up-and-down performance for me (looks great in spring through the first flush, then utterly crumbles from blackspot). I used it in some crosses last spring when it was new and before I had seen the full range of its behavior, so it will be interesting to see what the seedlings do.

Easy on the Eyes has some very nice features that could be developed further, although it really shuts down blooming during the heat of summer here, and more surprisingly, hasn’t been good about resuming flowering in the fall (most reblooming roses will crank back up once temperatures moderate). It has almost acted like a glorified once-bloomer. Its fragrance puts it well ahead of many of the others with persica eye blotches, to my thinking.

I had Bull’s Eye for about a nanosecond because it seems to have had RRD when it arrived, and I only saw a few flowers before being forced to rip it out. A few small root pieces accidentally left behind actually resprouted from underground with RRD. I took that as a bad sign, and haven’t been too tempted to try it again.

46

The nursery responsible for Bull’s Eye had a whoopsy some years back. Mine was from way before said whoopsy. Possibly a year before introductory year (7 Dees of Portland used to get upcoming material a year early, and Portland Nursery infrequently used to). I am not sure which cultivars, except one, were affected. Apparently there were a few other whoopsy cultivars during that time frame, as well ;] 101 reasons why not having vectors around is a good thing.

47

Yeah, I probably got my Bull’s Eye around the same year it was introduced–it was early enough that I can’t find an emailed invoice to tell me exactly when it was (somewhere in the 2009-2013 era)… not that RRV wouldn’t have been rolling around here anyway, but it definitely takes some time for a new infection to work its way down into the roots (and rootstock, in this case) like that, so I know that it couldn’t possibly have gotten infected here. It all happened much too fast, even when compared with those few roses that did become infected here and showed what I would call ultra quick intra-plant disease translocation (Ghislaine de Feligonde, Ivor’s Rose), but that is fortunately pretty rare. Usually, if the infection is caught soon after initial symptoms develop, the disease can be stamped out via pruning before it’s too late to save the rose. I’ve actually rescued one plant from what turned out to be multiple independent infections that occurred over several consecutive seasons; for a while, I was really questioning whether it really kept getting reinfected from the outside, or if my treatment wasn’t eliminating it as completely as I thought. Nevertheless, it has remained completely RRD free for at least six years now.

48

Hi everyone, as this discussion has been revived, i’d like to bring back one of the original topics discussed: is it worth it, and does it make sense, to go back to the original Harkness hybrids, or even to Hulthemia persica? In my opinion, we should first point out what we would like to get from our seedlings. If we simply want to get a modern shrub with a blotch, or we’d like our hybrids to inherit something more, like, e.g., pure yellow color without foetida influence.

As I understand, the main problemwe’d encounter by going back to the original hybrids are:

  • extremely low fertility
  • high thorniness
  • serious health issues
  • cane dieback
  • poor plant architecture
  • possibly, low resistance to wet environments
  • once more possibly, issues in propagation
    we should also add some “space management” issues, which would make working with original crosses harder for the most of us:
  • lack of juvenile bloom
  • need of old wood to flower
  • many once bloomers which we’d probably want to weed out

on the other hand, the blotch trait seems to be mostly dominant. As always, we have some supporting genes, but any variety with a blotch will probably be able to pass it on, at leat to some degree. It wouldn’t make much sense, in my opinion (of course, if we only care about the blotch), to spend our time that way. We could invest our time more efficiently by trying to breed our hulthemia hybrids to moderns or other species.

Yet, I’m sure that both the original species and the Harkness hybrids have much left to offer, if someone is patient enough to explore them. If we want to get something more than a blotch from Hulthemia, I guess it is probably necessary to go back to it.

Jim Sproul tried crossing back to Tigris a few years ago, but I don’t know if he got anything out of it. Here’s the link to the post on his blog where he talks about it

If I had unlimited space, I’d also find interesting to cross Hulthemia hybrids to wichuraiana. This could give us, in a few generations, some polyantha type with a blotch, which could be very pritty, imo.

49

"- cane dieback

  • possibly, low resistance to wet environments"

Persian Flame probably had one of the best colors I have ever seen in roses. At least for my tastes. It was sooo cool.

But it eventually did die. It HATED the wet winters here and had the issues your described. Even with good care, it only takes one freak year to kill it, and that is what happened. I had it for about 8 years. The stems simply rot… just like Rosa foetida and various tea types do here. Just…rots.

Mine was wickedly infertile and mostly once blooming. Californians said they had better fertility.

The other issue is this: We dont partipularly know how the eye passes on. I guess we can assume it only requires one allele of…whatever genetic process is happening… since Tigris display it just fine. What happens at the tetraploid level, where most commercial varieties are at?

What ploidy were Tiggle and Tingle, and did that make a difference? Persian Peach is probably a triploid (???) but the eye does not look very large. I realize petal width relates to eye size, naturally, but what else does?

I can tell you all that Bull’s Eye can create very large eyes. I have produced such, but why? What is causing these variations in eye size other than saturation and petal width relative to petal size?

Raspberry Kiss x First Light made bright red and small eye zones on the seedlings that willingly expressed the eye. Why?

In breeding, if there are at least 2 alleles or however this works are present in a tetraploid, it is probably A LOT easier than working with Rosa persica. It is quite common to get a nice plant with no eye, or a barely expressed eye due to lack of eye saturation. Inefficient.

50

Well I guess we can state that whatever it is it behaves mostly as a dominant trait (/traits), since basically all hybrids available have only one hulthemia parent, and that the dimension/intensity/heat resistance of the blotch does not depend only on the hulthemia side. I recall Jim Sproul stated that, when hulthemias were crossed with the knock outs, the blotch was rarely evident.

One more trait is the shape of the blotch. In most case it is a roundish spot with a more or less uniform separation. Sometimes, though, it looks like the blotch fades gradually (look See you in Pink on Kordes’ european website: https://www.rosen.de/en/garden-roses/collections/see-you/see-you-in-pink). In my opinion, a gradually fading blotch could be very helpful in adding depth to hybrids with more petals, even though the “intense” part of the blotch would be barely visible

51

This photo new on HMF seems like a good representation that the eye zone is not so much a singular color type.

From visuals, it looks like both peonin and cyanin, and not one OR the other. And, of course, its a series of halos rather that a singular “blotch”. Keeping the same symmetry as a picotee and bicolor face, except obviously in different spatial reference.

52

It isn’t really clearly presented on HMF, but I just finally understood that Euphrates does have one first (or second) generation descendant which has at least pollen fertility: Euphoria (Ilsink, 1997).
It’s also not clear if Euphoria is Mic Mac × Euphrates directly, or more likely, Mic Mac × (something × Euphrates).
But Euphoria at least seems pollen fertile, and has had several descendants. The only one that is rated on HMF ( OSO Easy Strawberry Crush) seems to be very disease resistant.
Euphoria appears to also be available in Europe.
Euphoria’s “blotch” is almost reversed compared with the other Hulthemias: yellow blotch and darker edges.

53

“Euphoria’s “blotch” is almost reversed compared with the other Hulthemias: yellow blotch and darker edges.” That’s not really a “blotch” but traditional rose petal coloring. Rose petal bases are most often either yellow or white. The Hulthemia (and Minutifolia) “blotches” and the mauve petal base as expressed in roses such as Orangeade and Anytime which were mined to produce Ralph Moore’s “Halo Roses” are the primary exceptions.

54

That’s interesting roseseek, thank you for the insight!
So, Euphoria wasn’t able to carry the Hulthemia blotch at all then… I wish I knew more about how Ilsink got the blotch back for the other interplant Hulthemias. Maybe he used Tigris descendants too. Or maybe it was some other Euphrates seedlings we don’t know about. I really wish they would say.

55

I believe Noack is trying to break through to North America again, like they did with the Flower Carpet roses (1G sales in perennial plant sections is such a good rose concept…).

They are also releasing Timeless HT series (romantic HT types w/ flowercarpet type health) via Monrovia.

Unsure how successful they will be, but look out for JoJo Peach in the big box stores in a future year. Ya never know.

56

Oh nice ! I didn’t know Noack had Hulthemia hybrids, that peach one looks great! Thank you for the info pacificjade!

57

It might be worth noting that Noack wasn’t the marketing genius behind the Flower Carpet roses’ breakthrough success–that would be Anthony Tesselaar. A lot of the changes in modern plant marketing could probably be traced back to that effort.

Weirdly, the one problem that the “earliest” (though not very early) persica hybrid I’ve grown has not had is especially disease-prone canes. A plucky Persian Sunset managed to survive against all the odds as a for about a decade in my garden as a puny runt, producing one or two flowers each spring before defoliating and being buried (literally) under heavy plant cover annually until starting all over the next season. I finally took pity on it last year and dug it up to hopefully build it up a little under indoor lights. Over that same time period, scores of otherwise far healthier roses have come, grown to mammoth proportions, and died. Whatever other problems the persica background may have imparted, that toughness that Persian Sunset showed has made me wonder. During early explorations I would have loved to try others like ‘Tigris’, or even Rosa persica itself, but the opportunity never really came up. Most likely they would have been miserable and died quickly, but you never know.

Still, I wonder if R. persica really has much else of great value to offer for rose breeders, given the obvious liabilities. There seems to be quite a lot of blotch diversity showing up in the offspring from the genetically narrow starting points (mostly from ‘Tigris’), and it at least seems unlikely that you could efficiently mine the species further for marginal gains. As a source of yellow petal coloration, do we know if it gains us anything over color traits already brought in from R. foetida? Would the goal be roses without compound leaves? What other species traits would be worth targeting, even in theory?

Using what is already further domesticated and (most importantly) available, there still needs to be more diversification of cultivars bearing the persica blotch trait across rose classes, possibly involving increased blotch color/size/shape variations. What exists has so far been heavily concentrated in shrub/groundcover types with fairly obvious, large and intensely colored blotches, but the field hasn’t expanded much from there. The work that has been done to this point has been very successful in terms of creating healthy, garden-worthy roses; it’s probably directly thanks to 20/20 hindsight about the problems of developing healthy garden roses with strongly colored, unfading yellow petals using R. foetida that breeding efforts have been focused in this way. There also hasn’t been a tremendous amount of blotch diversity seen on the commercial market yet. That’s probably at least partly because the trait is still regarded as a novelty overall, and there may be some marketing bias/selection involved, even though we’ve seen that it is possible to get a fair amount of blotch variation without going back to the species.

58

I imported Euphrates from Harkness 1985/86, the year they introduced it. The first several years it grew in a ten gallon nursery can until I moved the garden into the canyon where it continued for over 18 years. Euphrates grew on their root stock for MANY years in the mid SoCal desert. Annually, the rains would cause severe erosion on the canyon sides, literally burying the plant completely. By the time the run off and seepage dried enough for me to access it, every buried cane had rooted! I gave away dozens of own root Euphrates in those years. It flowered every year and it mildewed top to bottom, even the flower petals mildewed. That plant was finally pried from the canyon side, canned and moved with the roses I retained after the land was slated for development. Euphrates continued to mildew, every plant part, but the bloody thing REFUSED TO DIE. Finally, nine, perhaps ten (?) years ago, I bare rooted it from its pot and mailed it to Jim Sproul. It supplied MANY own root plants and always had mildew on it, but it simply would NOT die! It wasn’t terribly pretty nor particularly healthy for the hybrid class but it WAS durable. I tried importing all four of Harness’ original hybrids but Euphrates was the only one they had available. I traded own root Euphrates to Ralph Moore for an own root Tigris and an own root Euphrates to Laurie Chaffin at Pixie Treasures in Yorba Linda, CA for an own root Nigel Hawthorne. Nigel was the healthiest with the best plant under the largest, most attractive flower. I was never able to obtain Xerxes. Nigel is the only one I would make room for today.

59

Nigel also had a color I’ve never seen since. Persian Flame another. PErsica and stipples seem to bring out extremely rare colorations. Cinnamon Dolce and Mary Susan look like another rose at a distance. Once you are close, they are highly unique, with a lot of uncommon tonation within the colors.

60

Thank you @MidAtlas, @roseseek and @pacificjade for sharing your experience with Euphrates and Nigel Hawthorne!
“What other species traits would be worth targeting, even in theory?”
Hulthemia blood seems to give high heat and drought tolerance. This, combined with their small size, is what I am interested in; the blotch is a bonus.
I’d like to use very heat resistant roses that stay well under 1m high but have some pizzazz, and Hulthemias (among others) seem to fit that bill.
I wonder if Euphrates might have even better heat tolerance than Tigris. Euphrates is from Fairy Changeling, both of whose parents ( Fairy and Yesterday) are rated as having Excellent heat tolerance on HMF.
Reading the comments here, it seems that in spite of its susceptibility to mildew, Euphrates is a tough plant! And perhaps it won’t be so disease-prone out here.
I garden 150 meters from the coast in Malta. It’s very hot and rainless, but the air is quite humid, which is tempered by generally windy conditions. I spray only neem, about twice a year. I’ve never seen rust or mildew on any of my plants, hardly any blackspot and only occasional botrytis at the very beginning of spring.
I think the regular wafts of sulfur dioxide blowing down from the active Etna volcano north of here are to thank for that. The relentless spidermites are much more of a problem than disease in my garden.
So perhaps Euphrates descendants could be good candidates for my location. I guess I will just have to try them and see.