I didn’t get any of my crosses from last summer to take, but I collected about 1000 OP seeds from a wide variety of roses. Today I potted up 25 seedlings from these OP seeds. I was a little surprised that they germinated this early so I have them in the garage under lights. Here is what I have germinating so far:
Scarlet Knight
Happy Chappy
Buttermint
Topsy Turvy
Chihuly
These are your basic Home Depot varieties, but at least now I know I can get seeds to germinate. I’m really looking forward to pollination season. Maybe this year I can get some crosses to take.
I didn’t get any hips to form on crosses my first year of trying either. I think it was because I pruned the seed parents too hard and didn’t time my pollinations right.
Now, I just lightly prune the seed parents and make all of my crosses with fresh pollen, collected the day before. I only pollinate blooms that will open that same day, but carefully remove petals and anthers before applying pollen. With good seed parents, nearly every pollination takes now. Since you have roses that you know will set OP hips, those will be good ones to try using as seed parents.
There was some discussion a few months ago about hard pruning and one/two year old roses and their hip set. Last winter an “expert” taught me how to prune the roses down to about 12 inch canes. That same expert was asking when I was going to prune my plants this year. I told him I already did. I showed him where I took off the dead wood and some left over hips and blooms. He has pretty much decided I’ve hooked up with some type of sadistic rose cult.
Just a quick thanks and update on the plants you sent. The CHXGLPE cuttings have excellent roots and at last count nine have survived. The Rubrifolia X Pendulina is breaking buds and the three FAXRR15 are putting on new growth. I look forward to using them.
Great Jeff. I’ve also got R. kordesii x (R. glauca x R. pendulina) here to send you as soon as it finishes rooting.
RKOXGLPE is pushing new growth now but I need to give them another month or two for the roots to knit before shipping. It’s at least pollen fertile and of course should be hardy and disease resistant.
I’ll have more things for you to fill out a box when time comes.
That CHXGLPE seedling is pollen fertile. I’ve got seedlings coming along now. No mildew so far. (knock on wood)
“Most “rosarians” don’t know much. Trust me on that, and keep them as far from your garden as possible. I know I do.”
I agree with Robert on that one. There are one or two folks in our local group who still think the way to Winter prune shrubs and Hybrid Teas is to chop them down to 4" stumps annually. There is one character in particular who comes to help prune our local display garden and all he brings are his heavy duty loppers, the kind meant for removing tree limbs 2" in diameter. With him, all roses are treated the same: remove all top growth except 4" to 6" of stump. He once volunteered to come help me do my pruning years ago. I declined the offer.
Amen to that. They decimated a certain local heritage garden to the point where some plants actually died and many which remain have not yet recovered.
Annie Laurie McDowell and her husband restored the gardens at The Homestead Acre in the Valley as their retirement project. It’s owned by the Dept. of Parks and Recreation. The San Fernando Valley Rose Society volunteered to prune that garden one year. In it were decades old, virtually unpruned specimen of Rosette Delizy, Mons. Tillier, Safrano, La Biche, Devoniensis and many other wonderful things. Rosette Delizy was easily six by six feet. They did the “exhibition prune” on them and killed several. Even more never recovered. She was a very intuitive gardener and taught me much. Talk about mad enough to spit!
Robert, I am not officially a consulting rosarian now either as I let my “training hours requirement” lapse. Those “in charge” locally tried to make me feel that I would be losing an important title…
As for severe pruning, I have a guy that helps me once a week with clean up and raking/hula hoeing the place (he is really good at that). Well, I was getting behind on my schedule of things to do, so I asked him to prune some of my older roses. I indicated for him to prune them about waist high. Well, although he is shorter than me, I was surprised to see them chopped down to below “knee high”! At least these were unimportant roses that I generally do not use in breeding.
Hey now, I won ribbons But I wasn’t much for the shows. They always just left me feeling sad because of the way people behaved. It was even more so since I started at the age of 12, so I was obviously much younger. So, it always amazed me to see full grown men and women acting like children. Ive seen it all – rage, jealousy, anger, passive-aggression, arrogance and snobbery. I always tried to help the newcomers but I knew it was pointless because many of them were too nice to get thrown to the wolves. Also, shows are exhausting. They wore me out even as a teen because they require massive planning, sleeping very little, making sure everything is perfect and walking on extremely hard floors for hours on end.
I really enjoyed doing arrangements and bringing roses that no one else would. But my care factor died at about the age of 22. I did everything but win ht court anyhow, so I was satisfied. My favorite win was for best horticulture specimen for washington county, oregon. That win won me the perpetual trophy, which meant my name was engraved on it. Apparently this was a very bad thing since I was 18 and not in the “elite circle”. They were very angry and envious towards me from that day on. I thought it was humorous lol.
I do like HTs and the like. But not to the extreme exhibitors do. I think that HTs have their place in the landscape but that no rose class should be overdone in the landscape. Most HTs, for starters, are too linear, big and tall. Theyre just too extreme for the landscape. I tend to prefer the HTs that bloom a lot, give a lot to take inside the home, have neat blooms, require low care, are not too big and look a proper scale. Roses like Lynn Anderson or Marilyn Monroe are just insane. They have pretty blooms but that is just about it. They look crude in the landscape and don’t blend well when cut for indoor use.
Im glad that shrubs are becoming better known. I think it is a good thing. I hope rose culture becomes even further balanced than it is now.
“They always just left me feeling sad because of the way people behaved.”
Jadae, you nailed it with that statement.
The rose world shouldn’t revolve around the politics and the petty dramas of exhibitors and rose shows.
That’s the reason so many “rosarians” are clueless about pruning and treat everything like a budded exhibition HT.
They honestly don’t know any better. Why would they?
The tail has been wagging the dog for decades.
Membership is a shadow of what it once was.
I’ve heard there’s a movement afoot to create a new organization to satisfy the needs of exhibitors.
If true, in my opinion, this will be positive change, assuming ARS can get back to the business of education which should have always been it’s focus to begin with.
This said even if ARS reinvents itself it will be a long time, if ever, before it recovers it’s importance. The world changed. Too little was done too late.
Others like myself, have moved on and have no reason to go back.
Jadae I had a similar experience with shows. I did not show roses. I mostly showed dahlias and a few other flowers and vegetables. I gave that up when I was 16 for your same reason. The next two years I was a judge’s assistant. I learned a lot from doing that but it was far worse than exhibiting. Exhibiting most of the comments I heard under peoples breath or I would just get dirty looks. When I was helping judge… the comments flew right at us. I definitely would not do either one again.
I did find it funny when some of the pleasant people I met loss because they could not read directions. Personally I do not know about you but I really wasn’t there to win prizes I was there because these people supposedly shared my passion for gardening. I did not have a lot of people around I could share this with growing up. My friends then and now think I am weird.
On pruning roses. Where I live if you prune before winter has taken its share you would most likely have nothing less. My sister once asked me why her rose bush never bloomed. She was growing a damask and some body had taught her the method of pruning nearly to the ground every fall. It took quite a discussion to convince her that it needed hardly any pruning. Then we moved to some other plants like her lilacs that were also being pruned to death. I tried to drill my primary rule on pruning in her head. First take out dead, second really old, third shape but mostly leave to nature. Any ways it is too much effort to prune the way they do. i really think they see roses as annuals and not as shrubs. However there is a tree limb at my mother in laws that every time I mow I wished someone would have taken it out a long time ago. It is right about shoulder level. More than once I have tried to rip off my head with that huge limb while looking down at the grass mowing. Perhaps she needs a hosta garden or some thing similar.
I’ve sort of given up on my parents on this. My mom is going to deadhead any rose I give her. Try explaining to her that rugosas will have repeat bloom without deadheading…same thing with triploids. I’ve resigned myself to never getting seeds from my parents yard.
All of these complaints are actually completely explainable. The RNRS was initially a “gentlemen’s club” for the landed gentry. Of course nurserymen were involved in the Chelsea Flower Show and its like, but “rose shows” were for the men to compete against each other. Nurserymen and gentlemen of leisure, “landed” or titled people made up the ranks.
Hybrid Perpetuals were the rose of choice. A round flower outline which fits well and looked wonderful in an English Box was the standard. It made no difference how the plant grew nor how diseased they were because nothing but the flower was ever shown. The plants didn’t have to grow well nor did they even have to LOOK good. There was no “landscape” use as there were gardens for each type of plant or flower. You read about visiting the rose garden in June as that is when they bloomed in Britain. When not on bloom, or once they rusted or black spotted too badly, you avoided the rose garden and visited the perennial borders.
Being “landed”, they could afford “gardeners”, not the manicurists we call gardeners these days, but honest to goodness gardeners. People who KNEW each type of flower and could make them SING!
The ARS was begun by florists and nurserymen as a trade organization. It wasn’t until the boom in the twenties more “common folk” began joining, then after WW11, with increasing leisure time, membership grew.
Many HPs had to be cut nearly to the ground to get the proper bloom. The “experts” knew and the old rose books promoted that style of pruning. Like all the other urban legends, one book says it so it MUST be gospel. Each “author” reads it and repeats it blindly because the previous book they wrote before their “authoritative rose book” was their “authoritative horse riding book”. We all know how the “expert” advice we read is mostly hogwash.
I have a neighbor who inherited a plant of R. centifolia cristata with the property. It never blooms because every March he comes out and hacks it down to a stump. I explained why he should not be pruning it that way, and although he wanted me to think I had instilled some new wisdom in him, I could tell by the look in his eyes that he thought I didn’t know what the eff I was talking about. He continues to hack it down every Spring, and still it refuses to flower. I guess I was wrong! laughs
But I wasn’t much for the shows. They always just left me feeling sad because of the way people behaved. It was even more so since I started at the age of 12, so I was obviously much younger. So, it always amazed me to see full grown men and women acting like children. Ive seen it all – rage, jealousy, anger, passive-aggression, arrogance and snobbery. I always tried to help the newcomers but I knew it was pointless because many of them were too nice to get thrown to the wolves. Also, shows are exhausting. They wore me out even as a teen because they require massive planning, sleeping very little, making sure everything is perfect and walking on extremely hard floors for hours on end.