I absolutely love Bukavu. It never stops blooming once it starts. I never spray it. I only tip prune it during the summer. And the cheerful red/white combo makes a great landscape accent. It is, however, a big plant. If I didnt control it, it could easily compete with the butterfly bush.
And, yeah, Roar! is mine.
I’ve had over 1000 seedlings germinate so far. Germination rates seem better than usual, with some crosses having >75% germination. That’s balanced by some wide crosses that have had 0% germination so far. Some crosses that have germinated particularly well are:
(Mons. Tillier X Mutabilis) X Plaisanterie
Danae X Mutabilis
Lyda Rose X (The Gift X unknown)
(The Gift X unknown) X Lyda Rose
(Lilac Charm X Purple Heart) X Royal Amethyst
((Magenta X Lilac Charm) X Cafe Ole) X Stainless Steel
Midnight Blue X ((Magenta X Lilac Charm) X Cafe Ole)
Midnight Blue X (Schoener’s Nutkana X Coral Dawn)
Orangeade X Pinstripe
Secret X Sunset Celebration
Stainless Steel X Ingrid Bergman
Apricot Twist X (Sonia X New Zealand)
I germinate the seedlings in the house, and move them out to the greenhouse a couple of weeks later. Here’s a photo I took in the greenhouse this morning:
Jim, I am gonna try White Lightnin’ this year. It’s somewhat similar, lineage-wise, to Royal Amethyst. Maybe you should try it too?
I looked for White Lightnin’ a few years ago, and didn’t find it then. How is its health? Royal Amethyst is pretty good here, but could be better. Royal Amethyst was bred just a few miles from where I live.
Liz, growing seedlings out of doors IS sort of glamorous. lol I can kill a day in the garden really easily!
Actually I’ve noted others who use lights are often ahead of the game.
Germinating seedlings out of doors mean we have to deal with vagaries of the weather like today when the winds are strong. We don’t have control of conditions which can be important.
The nice thing is that seedlings are hardened off really well. Internodes on my seedlings are much closer together than the photos I see by others of seedlings grown indoors.
Jim, those are great crosses. You look really organized in comparison to how I grow out seedlings. I use the survival of the fittest method.
Jadae, does ‘Bukavu’ mildew? With that lineage I can see where it might.
I grew ‘White Lightnin’ here for several years. The growth habit wasn’t all the great and repeat could have been better. I finally shovel pruned it.
‘Royal Amethyste’ has moments of grandeur but the blossoms hang on way too long and look unattractive. JMHO
No mildew for Bukavu here.
White Lightnin’ grows like a floribunda here.
Is your White Lightnin own-root or budded Jadae?
Has ‘Bukavu’ proven fertile?
Thanks, Robert
Own-root from Northern Rosarium!
Heirlooms carries it now, too. The scent, color and form are hard to beat. I love it.
Bukavu will go both ways, I believe. Unfortunately, as a seed parent, Ive always thrown iffy things on it which are likely infertile. The problem with Bukavu is that I never know what do breed it with. It is obviously male fertile. Crossing it with Gemini was mainly out of frustration. I wanted to see what it’d produce…and Gemini is an easy setter =P However, I did want to go the floribunda route with it. Without external sources, floribundas become more and more a dwarf HT. Which, I like, …theyre great in the garden over jumbo HT’s… but my all time favorite class of all of rosedom is the true floribunda. It is hard to beat a floribunda in full bloom for dynamic color per sqaure inch, yet still perfect to take inside to a vase. I also love floribunda-like climbers for this reason, too.
btw Ballerina mildews here while Bukavu does not. However, Rosa multiflora doesnt mildew here as well. But I do note that Bukavu’s foliage is thicker than any of the above two.
My ‘White Lightnin’ was budded, and virused. Surprise! Surprise!
I might eventually try it again. It’s obviously a different creature own-root, and in the PNW.
Ballerina DOES mildew here. That’s what made me wonder about ‘Bukavu’, THAT and the fact that ‘Bouquet Parfait’ mildews here and it also comes out of the Lens multiflora line that created Bukavu.
There’s got to be a genetic propensity to mildew in the phenotype for Bukavu. I’d use it with something really clean, perhaps, ‘Cherry Meidiland’, and hope for the best.
Do you people write down germination-caracteristics?
I noticed a huge difference between my English rose crosses and Rugosa (hybrid) OP germination like tempature and which kind did germinated earlier than others in the same environment. Which did germinated in the freezer below 4 Celsius, above 4 Celcius and room tempature.
Regards,
Timo
I tend to record what is germinating when, if there are off-type seedlings being produced, and some way of getting a sense of % germination of a particular cross or seed parent. I’m still relatively new at this so my number of seedlings are not out of control yet. And I view the note taking as helping me learn. Perhaps when I’m having to deal with large numbers of seedlings, the note taking will cease.
Liz
Hi Liz,
I like using MS Excel. It is easy to set up and you can do quite a lot of analyzing with just a few numbers. I always record number of hips, number of seeds, and number of seeds that germinate (up to a point, I usually stop counting when germinations slow significantly).
Below is a link to a comparison of germinations between two of my seed parents: J3-4 and ‘Sam Trivitt’.
You can see that while ‘Sam Trivitt’ has a better germination rate, J3-4 has more germinations per hip. So if you’re looking to do fewer crosses, J3-4 provides more seedlings for each cross made (both of these seed parents set hips with nearly every cross made).
Jim Sproul
Link: sproulrosesbydesign.com/2008_Germination_Comparison.htm
I keep a spreadsheet very much like Jim Sproul’s. I also use percent germination and germinations per hip to compare parents and crosses. I just compared my 2007 crosses with my 2007 open-pollinated hips.
2007 crosses:
401 hips
3883 seeds (9.7 seeds per hip)
1033 germinations (26.6% germination)
2.6 germinations per hip
2007 open-pollinated hips:
40 hips
231 seeds (5.8 seeds per hip)
25 germinations (10.8% germination)
0.63 germinations per hip
The seeds are still germinating, so the numbers will go up, but I don’t think that they will change the comparison much. I got more than 4 times as many germinations per hip from my crosses than I did from open-pollinated hips. I probably won’t collect as many open-pollinated hips this year. (But I say that every year…)
Although percent germination and germinations per hip are useful for comparisons, there are other considerations that may be more important. For example, two crosses that I tried for the first time this year were WTG X ‘Lyda Rose’ and PTG X ‘Lyda Rose’. WTG is a white open-pollinated seedling of ‘The Gift’; PTG is a pink open-pollinated seedling of ‘The Gift’. Both crosses had 100% hip set.
WTG X ‘Lyda Rose’
28 hips
337 seeds (12.0 seeds per hip)
106 germinations (31.5% germination)
3.8 seedlings per hip
PTG X ‘Lyda Rose’
31 hips
188 seeds (6.1 seeds per hip)
49 germinations (26.1% germination)
1.6 seedlings per hip
Although the WTG cross was much more efficient, I may choose to repeat the PTG cross next year and not the WTG cross. Only about 20 seedlings from these crosses have bloomed, so it’s a little early to evaluate them, but so far, I like the PTG seedlings better. The WTG seedlings tend to be more gangly and less floriferous. Both crosses are giving me a wider range of colors than I expected, but the PTG seedlings tend to have deeper colors. Also, some of the PTG seedlings have interesting looking blue-green foliage.
looks good jim. that helps me alot for this year. i’m going to do 50 crosses so
hopefully i get 40-45 hips in the fall with about 400 seeds. thats all i can handle
indoors next january.
Patrick, my numbers were the averages for a large number of crosses. Some crosses produced many more seeds per hip; some crosses produced no hips. A few crosses had 100% germination; a few crosses had 0% germination. The numbers you get will depend a lot on what parents you use.
My germination rate for my crosses is for the most part higher than for my OP seeds. The exceptions are Carefree Beauty OP 32%, John Cabot OP 55% and 3K20 OP 25%. The 3K20 OP seeds I got from David. 3K20 is a tetraploid Max Graf OP seedling. Otherwise the OP seeds are germinating at from 0% to 11%.
Most of my OP seeds are from the second and third flushes. Whereas the crosses are from the first flush of flowers. I’m sure this has something to do with the germination rates.
I think it was Jadae that lets the OP hips stay on the plant as long as possible to get a better germination rate. If I collect OP hips next year then that’s what I’m going to do also.
Well to update my germinations. I
I finally had a day off today, so I used what little sun we had (it has hailed 3 days in a row!!!), and counted germinations.
03-07 Henry’s Bend x mixed tetraploid pollen
05-07 Rosa californica x Royal Amethyst
06-07 Sevilliana x mixed tetraploid pollen
07-07 Whisper x Voodoo
08-07 Rugosa alba x mixed tetraploid pollen
11-07 Rosa californica x Rosa multiflora
12-07 Livin Easy x Sevilliana/Gold Medal/Baby Love
15-07 Rosa californica x Baby Love
16-07 Tatton x Pretty Lady/Purple Heart/Rosarium Utersen
18-07 Renaissance x Funny Face
21-07 American Honor x Sevilianna (holy crap, these are huge seedlings in relative size!!!)
25-07 Gemini x Bukavu
33-07 Toprose x Pretty Lady/Baby Love
34-07 Cherry Meililand x mixed tetraploid pollen
37-07 Solitaire x (Princess Alice x Freedom)
39-07 Carefree Marvel x mixed diploid pollen
43-07 Candy Land x Tatton
44-07 Sheer Elegance x Hoagy Carmichael
45-07 Tequila x Tatton
47-07 Night Owl x Oranges & Lemons
48-07 Toprose x Candy Land
53-07 Solitaire x Rotary Sunrise
56-07 Sheer Elegance x Rotary Sunrise
63-07 Purple Heart x Firefighter
I think 10 more crosses or so are due to germinate en mass.
early conclusions: Autumn Sunset is either a slow germinator or a horrible seed parent. Also, using mixed yet selected pollen seems to be working out really, really well. Toprose, Sevilliana and Henry’s Blend have exeeded my expectations as new seed parents for me. Im very happy with the results so far this year.
I had my first germination of this spring. It is:
324 (Prairie Harvest X R-15) X 235 (George Vancouver X John Davis)
I have added a column D (number of “seeds germinated”) to my 2007 hips spreadsheet which is located at:
Link: spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pxHhTw7ylg79q5lJNd6PCNA&hl=en
I have added a spreadsheet that is sorted by the number of germinations, see:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxHhTw7ylg79B5JBvzLf9Lw
It will normally be updated daily. Each day I check the contents of 1 of the 2 refrigerators (of course, alternating daily).
A zero in the number of germinations column indicates that the hip did not contain any seeds.
Link: spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxHhTw7ylg79B5JBvzLf9Lw