I’m new to this game but was wondering on opinions for breeding a very double old English looking rose re-bloomer with apricot, yellow, or light orange flowers preferably fragrant for planting in zone 9a. Don’t care about cut flower vase life just want something unique to look at in the garden prefer shrub style bushes.
Was considering picking 2 of these verities:
Roald Dahl
Märchenzauber
Abraham Darby
Golden Celebration
Lady Emma Hamilton
Any great additional suggestions I should consider? Anyone have experience with these roses and see them breed successfully as mother father or both?
Welcome, @lewkat! You should become a Premium Member of Help Me Find-Roses so you can research whether any of the roses you have questions about have been commercially used as either pollen or seed parents, and what their offspring look like. You can also research what made other roses you admire simply by clicking on the “Lineage” tab on the rose’s page. You can use the Advanced Search to see all the sports, results from the use of its pollen or the results using it for seed parent, or just view all of the listed offspring of any sort. Premium Membership is a reasonable $24 a year and is easily obtained. https://helpmefind.com . From Abraham Darby’s rose page, it shows there are 89 listed offspring in the first generation. Some of those are duplicate listings as the search reports each synonym as an individual entry, but each is also listed on the rose’s page so you can quickly determine if they are the same rose. From the Advanced Search, it shows approximately two dozen results using Abe’s seed and six pages of approximately 25 results per page using Abe’s pollen. It’s a remarkable research tool and can provide hours of interesting exploration.
Lady emma hamilton sets seed, but ive never had any of them germinate :(. i havent really used the pollen much though, i got greenmantle to accept LEH pollen this last year, so you may have more success using it at as father. Disease resistance for LEH in charleston is also just ok, its not phenomenal. Buut i LEH has my favorite fragrance of flower, the foliage looks gothic, and the flowers are almost fluorescent. The color also holds really well.
Abraham Darby is a rather workable parent (both directions), and it can seemingly survive indefinitely here with or without leaves, but its blackspot resistance in my hot, humid climate is poor and the plant frankly looks unattractive most of the time. Its seedlings can have very attractive and fragrant flowers. It is probably most wisely crossed only with roses that can provide the disease resistance it lacks–maybe tapping into its much healthier Aloha background. I haven’t grown Golden Celebration in this climate and can’t comment directly, but any fertile offspring of Abraham Darby might be promising for breeding if you can counteract the poor blackspot resistance.
I’ve used Lady Emma Hamilton as a pollen parent, and it is reasonably fertile that way. LEH is fairly attractive in spring and fall here in Maryland but practically naked in between. In my experience, while seedlings with LEH as a parent can have a pleasant fragrance (not necessarily measuring up to that of LEH itself), its orange color might not be so easy to reproduce in its offspring, and their petal count tends to be on the low side. The lackluster results have made me question spending more time trying to work with it in breeding, but the flowers are very enjoyable for their color and fragrance (it might be worth noting that my plant came from DA infected with Rose Mosaic Virus, so I’m not sure if there is RMV-free stock in the U.S.)
I did not have a good experience with Roald Dahl here–it went from healthy to diseased to dead within a short timespan. The flowers it produced weren’t exciting enough for me to want to try it again.
I haven’t grown Bliss Parfuma yet, but it seems like blackspot should be less of a problem for it. If it’s as healthy as it is said to be, it might be one to try crossing with the likes of Abraham Darby or maybe Golden Celebration to see what happens.
Welcome! I am in zone 9a too. According to my observation, Abraham Darby seems promising. It’s very vigorous, flower freely (unlike some Austin roses tend to send long flowerless shoots in summer) and relatively good summer flower quality. However as @ MidAtlas said, it’s quite prone to blackspot (although not fatal but quite ugly). I think you can cross it with some very disease resistant landscape roses. Note that ’ Brite Eyes’ (RADtee × Abraham Darby) is VERY blackspot resistant (the same level as ‘Knock Out’ according to a research). Since BE is not very double, it’s your chance to create one. Perhaps you can try AD’s seed parent, Aloha (cl. hybrid tea, Boerner before 1949), which seems much better disease resistant than AD and with similar gorgeous flowers.
I am definitely enjoying growing Abraham Darby seedlings! Good range of colours coming, mostly pastel shades of pink/apricot/yellow this far, but I’d imagine it could be persuaded to throw other, deeper colours with the right pollen-parents.
It’s not terribly BS-resistant, and its OP seedlings tend to the same, so outcrossing to stronger lines is warranted.
I have no experience with Marchenzauber, but KORDES has created some amazingly disease-resistant roses. It could help AD in that regard, but it’s hard to say without a better idea of its pedigree.
Thanks for the suggestions guys I decided to go with Poets Wife which wasn’t even up there lol and Golden Celebration and paring them with a wild native rose to my region known as the swamp rose that is pretty disease resistant even very rare to get RRD though not impossible. Not really sure how it will work out but we will see. At least I will have some pretty blooms now and again if not lol. Might come back to this forum for y’all’s suggestions that you gave if it doesn’t work. I’m starting a journal on HelpMeFind roses so follow me there for updates and I’ll try to come back here too every now and again.
Hi Lewkat. We need more female hybridizers Yeah!!! I would use Märchenzauber for sure. The others look like DAs and so you might not get as unique genetic expression in your cross, because David Austin is often using them. Some you way want to add into your crosses would be older french varieties. Clotilde Soupert, Souvenir de la Malmaison, Madame Pierre Oger