I was weeding part of the yard I don’t normally visit and almost pulled it up. It’s growing in a very shaded, inhospitable, spot for a rose (under a muscadine and crabapple tree bower). It’s nowhere near my rose garden so I think the birds brought the seed from somewhere else. It doesn’t look like anything I’m growing and seems to have ‘species’ disease resistance/vigor. I find two things odd about it. First it has no stipules (actually it has two little hairs as stipules). Second the plant is hairy (which probably keeps the rose slugs off… which is a real problem in my yard). None of my other roses exhibit these characteristics. For the fact that it has a few small prickers, I would almost question it was a rose. Anyone know of any species without stipules and hairy?
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Looks more like Rubus than Rosa…but it could be Rosa or even something else. However, the leaf bracts remind me of Rubus and not Rosa. It would be helpful to know your state as to know what exactly may be native there.
East Tennessee. Near the unicoi mtn range.
BTW. I didn’t think about it perhaps being a blackberry. It doesn’t quite look like a blackberry either but maybe the immature seedlings look different than the adults. Anyways, I think you may be right.
Well, the genus Rubus is huge, and it includes way more than just blackberries. It has a lot of weird species in it x_X
Has anyone tried crossing roses with a Rubis?
Hi, Jon,
I’m in Grainger County to the north of you a couple of counties.
Do you know Dewberries? They tend to scramle along the ground and we don’t get the berries often, but they are good. (That real big terminal leaflet is also not as rosey as it might be.)
A friend in Greene County has a creek hugging rose that isn’t multiflora and it doesn’t seem to be palustris and those are our two more common wild roses.
That said, there is another rose species out there that may be lost, some called it the Appalachian Rose and its formal designation is Rosa obtusiuscula. If your plant were to start to look like the dried roses in the only two existing sheets, it would be beyond exciting. My computer is slow tonight; I’ll try to add links to the herbarium sheets tomorrow. The type location of obtusiuscula is Cocke County, near Del Rio, which topographically and soil wise may be very similar to your growing conditions.
Has anyone tried crossing roses with a Rubis?
Not yet 
Koopman et al (“A case study in rosa”, cited elsewhere on this MB) give genetic distances between various roses and Rubus species. According to their Bayesean chart, R. foetida, R. persica, R. sericea, R. hugonis and R. spinosissima (in that order) are the most closely related roses to Rubus. In order of relatedness to roses, the Rubus species they tested are R. phoenicolasius, R. caesius and R. fucticosa.
What’s really interesting is that the genetic distances between the Rubus species and the above roses is less than those roses are from many of the other roses on the chart.
In light of this data the best chance of successful out-crosses to any Rubus species is with the above roses (or their close hybrids). Keep in mind that seed morphology is a female trait so the result of Rubus pollen on Rosa blooms would be hips and achenes like any other, and vice versa.
Imagine the cherokee rose-like wine you could make with that! 
Didn’t Joseph Tychonievich play with this kind of cross?
I wonder if R. Setigera is not a natural cross between a rose and a rubus.
I wonder if R. Setigera is not a natural cross between a rose and a rubus.
Because of the leaves? Interesting thought.
I knew this discussion sounded familiar. Here is a link to a post regarding this very topic.
Link: www.rosehybridizers.org/forum/message.php?topid=17441#17855
Well I should have known when I came across this while searching.
"Hulthemosa (formerly Simplicifoliae, meaning “with single leaves”) containing one or two species from southwest Asia, R. persica and R. berberifolia (syn. R. persica var. berberifolia) which are the only roses without compound leaves or stipules. "
The fact that rubus has compound leaves makes me think that it’s closer to other rose species than hulthemia is, and with a lot of work, hulthemia has been successfully hybridized.
I do have two other found unidentified local species that I have taken cuttings from.
The first I found growing IN the Hiwassee river, for that reason I was thinking it was perhaps a swamp rose.
I have not seen a bloom yet. Short/small and stoloniferous. The stipules are long and tube like.
It has an odd pricker pattern.
The other I found growing near the Hiwassee river. Small pink flowers.
Seems to stick to five leaflets.
and has small curved prickers.
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I did try crossing Rubus odoratus x Rosa setigera a while ago (Goodness… must be 7 or 8 years ago now) I got seedlings but they appeared to be selfs. I remember reading somewhere that some rubus can be apomitic, so if I were to try the cross again I would use Rosa as the seed parent.
Joseph
Jon,
In these parts, setigera blooms a bit (3-4 weeks) after all the local multiflora. The blooms are ususally singles and pure pink. I think our setigeras are smaller (shorter) than many that are out on the Great Plains. Setigeras also some years have excellent fall colors. (If the rose I bought as palustris was palustris, it bloomed almost at the same time as multiflora.)
In the early 1830s, a national congressman from Tennessee took setigera (which he called the Tennessee Rose) to Washington. At least one version of the early hybridizing by Feast in Baltimore has Feast and or Cook using cuttings of that Tennessee Rose to provide one parent in making the wonderful once blooming hybrid setigera climbers.
Well thank you. I think that second one is setigera. Because of that, I found this cool link:
Jon,
Your first photos depict something from the Blackberry/Raspberry family, I am certain of that. That seedling is identical to the many hundreds of (Himalayan) Blackberry seedlings I weed out of the garden every year.
Regards,
Paul
So cool I have a setigera.
Something else interesting, there was a population of these from where I took my cutting and I noticed some plants had more conspicuous flowers than the others but I took my cutting from a plant that had the inconspicuous flowers for whatever reasons. So apparently I picked a female.
“Rosa setigera is the only rose that is cryptically dioecious. (male plants have more flowers)”
Just so we’re all on the same page.
First one is a blackberry, dewberry, or other rubus.
Second one is a palustris.
Third one is a setigera.
Much thanks for the help you all.
Jon,
For a number of years, I thought my setigera from a hillside (that has since been bulldozed to flatness) outside of Pigeon Forge (it was planted by a not longer standing house) was a male. Last year, for the first time, it set seeds. That’s the sort of evidence that can’t be argued with.