The seedlings seem to change a lot by their third year and now I’m thinking it’s going to take four or five years to see the total potential.
I have a seedling with full flowers and lots of them but they always hung down which was such a negative and now the new canes have flowers up and out.
Other HTs looked okay but had rather small flowers and now are like five plus inches but rather sparse.
So just how long does it take for the seedlings to mature? Neil
This is a complex Q !!
We already know some roses may not even bloom for years and years…it seems so unpredictable to determine when maturity will happen, in some cases !!!
If I had the time and space I would not be so keen to cull most anything in the first few years, exactly for the reasons you are confirming here.
Limited resources will force the culls however…
How many acres do you need George, I have some to spare for the seedlings/plants you do not want.
It is nice to know I have some rose friends here, why thank you, sir!
I might even take you up on that David…one day!
Neil,
I have been breeding/hybridizing roses for 5 yrs now, so I cannot speak with ‘Years’ of deep experience, so based on that, I have noticed that many roses do show changes in at least the first 3-4 yrs of life. I do know just from raising different roses over the last 30-40 yrs, that while most roses don’t really change when well established, once they are marketed many do continue to adapt to their surroundings after they are planted out or transplanted, in ways that probably relate to root growth, immunity (often improves), sun or shade adaptation, etc. To make a decision to dump a newly planted rose (under 2-yrs, sometimes longer) without allowing it to become fully acclimatized is very uninformed. But some roses will take off without hesitation, or stalling, and without cause, but not all. Immature roses mostly seem to change somehow with color, their mature/immature foliage may change somewhat ( have seen that at least up to three yrs.), they often add petals (common), and the size of the overall blossom increases.After 2-3 yrs they may still become more floriferous, and blooms may develop slightly more substance to the petals. I haven’t noticed much change in fragrance but that is one thing I have heard/read that happens a lot. So, the short answer is yes, immature roses do change in many ways, and it may take anywhere from 2-5 yrs for a modern seedling to mature. Climbers, species, and early generational crosses may take longer to express their mature form. Roses, immature or mature, do exhibit changes based on temperatures,low or high, the weather in general, and to other water/nutritional supplements or lack thereof.
Give me another 2-3 yrs of observing the growth changes of seedlings and maybe I’ll note a few more changes based on maturing.
There is considerable variation in maturity among different lineages. I raised a nice seedling from ‘Blush Noisette’ x ‘Popcorn’ that simply got larger in all its parts as it matured. No dramatic change at all. But in a cross of ‘Sweet Chariot’ x ‘Margo Koster’ the one seedling that survived was puny with poorly formed flowers for a year or so, then abruptly put up a stronger shoot with nice flowers. All subsequent shoots were the same, so it must have passed some maturity threshold.
It has long been known that apple seedlings 1-2 years old are “plastic” in the sense that when established cultivars are grafted onto them, the roots change to the habit of the cultivar. In most cases, anyway. The Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata), for example, forces the young stocks to develop much branched, wiry roots.
I think it would be interesting to compare the influence of different stocks and different environmental conditions on seedlings. That is, bud a seedling onto two or more rootstocks, and keep the original on its own roots.
Karl
‘Sweet Chariot’ seedlings do the same here. The first time I used it I was germinating a lot of OP seeds to test germinability. They all turned out to be once flowering though some on here suggested that it had an extended juvenile stage. I kept them for three years and they only ever flowered once. All of these were discarded. I have one ‘Sweet Chariot’ a ‘Poynton’s Multiflora’ which is, obviously, once flowering but in terms of growth the biggest change was not in the size of the bloom but in the stature of the plant. For two years it was spindly and in the third year it began to shoot out monster canes and form a large fountain/hybrid muck-type plant. You can see it now on HMF as ‘Sweetflora’. I have kept one other ‘Sweet Chariot’ OP seedling from two years ago and it is the only repeater I’ve managed to get from it but it took two years for it to repeat and to start to grow up and out. The first flower and its current flower look the same but the flowers are now borne in large trusses instead of singly like the first ones were.
Whow, at only twenty keepers/year by five years that’s a lot of roses and this year there more than twenty. It’s not going to be hard to get rid of some(soil conditioners) but for others just for lack of blooms is harder. This is what is randomly coming on.
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These are five inchers, few flowers and slow repeat.
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Looks like you’re having a lot of fun!..try and watch out for the one that stands out a mile in front of the rest !