I like the apparent health, fragrance and free flowering vigor of Souvenir de St Anne, and wondered if anyone has any information on its’ fertility. I also notice that Earth Kind designated it EarthKind rose of the year in 2009. I havent noticed any hips on it, but it might get sheared where I have seen it growing. I am replacing a couple of duds and like the look of this for one.
Help Me Find lists 351 unique descendants for Malmaison. If that dawg grows well for you where you garden, St. Anne’s will likely do better. If anything, I’d expect it would be easier to breed from St. Anne’s due to greater stamen and anthers.
Malmaison doesn’t do well here, but St. Anne’s is OK. If their foliage is OK there, go for it. Personally, its foliage is SO bad here, I wouldn’t touch it. I do grow it at a client’s house because she likes it, and she has a very fussy Malmaison, too. Neither is what anyone would call “good”, though.
St.Anne does well here and I wondered how it does elsewhere–but earthkind roses do better overall in most places, do they not? I know that there is not such a thing as one size fits all, even in roses. But St. Anne does bloom continually, and has such fragrance. It also seems to have lots of pollen, so I was wondering why no listed descendants. I am more than willing to try it with some more modern types.
Malmaison was introduced nearly 170 years ago. St. Anne’s was introduced roughly 60 years ago. It just means no one has used its pollen, but it should be pretty much identical sexually to Malmaison.
If you wish to believe the Earth Kind rhetoric, then yes, they do perform “better” in most places. Here in Southern California, Bourbons are, in general, terrible. St. Anne’s will at least grow and flower before dying back, and it is guaranteed to mildew here. HPs and Bourbons just don’t have the foliage to live here. Tbe season is too long, difference between seasons not distinct enough and they just don’t wear durable enough clothes to look acceptable here.
lol, cross it to Knock Out.
Ouch! Today, I finally saw some Knock Out which were nearly attractive. They nearly looked like small bush versions of Altissimo. Knock Out isn’t attractive here most of the year. The lighter colored ones bleach out terribly and quickly like so many of the British roses. I am frightened to even consider what a Bourbon with Knock Out would produce! LOL!
haha, I think it is ugly here too. The double versions of both have color tone that is more saturated. The double pink looks like gum and the double red is almost red, and thats at a nearly sea level valley floor in the PNW… 
The foliage looks nice tho
I have a friend that has about a 20 yard row of red Knockouts in his front yard up against a white picket fence and it sure does look nice. When most roses are dying and looking quite “ugly” this time of year in the Northeast, I have to say Knockout is the only one still with healthy crisp foliage and blooms galore. I might consider getting a few next year for my front yard.
I’d recommend the double red. It looks the most aesthetic out of the bunch. It seems to retain color better than the original. I cannot see any difference in red, double red, pink or blush. Double pink’s plant, however, looks less impressive than the others.
A real estate/developer’s office here has a dozen of the dbl red Knockout in front around their big sign, and they almost always look good when doing a drive bye. I have used dbl pink Knockout in two clients’ yards, but they got hit hard with downy mildew two springs ago and did not recover. Very susceptible. But it is hard to get past that bubblegum and cherry red coloration personally. I can see where they would look good grouped against a white picket fence, because they look good around that sign.
Regarding Malmaison and St.Anne, if you got much further So. Cal. than I am, you would be in Tijuana, and I have seen both of these growing well and looking good here. I am not exactly coastal and that might make a difference? I maybe assume that Bourbons are more tropical than they really are-will do some reading on that subject. But that is why I ask.
Jackie, I’m in Palm Springs and had Souvenir de St. Annes own-root for years.
Much of the year it was much as you state, beautiful here.
When mildew season hit it was another story, very sad, much like Kim’s experience.
I would personally use it for hybridizing.
Of course I said that about ‘Duchesse de Brabant’ too and now I have a number of offspring.
So far they are apparently much cleaner that their parent. Go figure.
I wasnt joking about the Knock Out though. I really did mean to try it, maybe you can retain the architecture and floral traits of the bourbon, yet retain the foliage, branching and easy of rooting of the KO. Or maybe not It worked for others though.
I believe the difficulties with Bourbon and HP foliage in most SoCal climates are due to several issues. First, when most were selected, not only was there a continual rain of sulfur falling from the skies due to higher sulfur coal and oil being burned, but many were grown in larger gardens where the roses were relegated to the “rose garden”, and other plants were grown in their “gardens”. Most who grew roses were “of means” and could easily go to the rose gardens when they were in their season, then select other gardens when the roses were over. They looked good in their time, but once they started to fade and look tired and sickly, they could easily be ignored because something else was performing. Many had the means to have real “gardeners” who would know the issues with each cultivar, leaving the landowner to enjoy things at their best.
Reading old rose books, it’s often suggested the roses had “played out”, lost vigor and health, for one reason or another. Once they stopped being daily dusted with sulfur, they mysteriously became weaker and more susceptible to fungal attacks.
We have more extreme light and heat intensities in most of our area climates. Unless you’re speaking of the real extremes of high snow areas, most growing seasons around here are literally year round. The foliage quickly becomes used up and geriatric, succumbing to the geriatric diseases of rust and black spot. I’ve seen it on Damasks, Centifolias and other shorter season types. Albas in many cases begin clean and finish diseased. Where shorter seasons freeze the foliage off before it becomes geriatric or they are pruned to reduce potential snow damage, here, they are left to their own devices, so they continue growing and retain the old foliage until a fungus causes it to either fall or be removed.
Add that we don’t have the luxury of banishing them to their own dedicated areas and are forced to live with them up close and personally and you are reminded of their short comings every time you see them. There are some areas in SoCal where the better ones will live up the their reputations, but they are seemingly the exceptions rather than the rule.
The Malmaison issue around these parts is, I believe, we have greater potential for mildew early and late in the year; we don’t have the sulfur rain; the heat and light are so great the foliage burns and the plant is encouraged to hold it far too long. This foliage type just isn’t durable enough for these parts. Neither are Mme Ernst Calvat, Mme Issac Pereire, Zéphirine Drouhin, Souv. de Mme August Charles and most other “favorites” you frequently see listed.
Jackie, you might have a plan which it could prove useful, but sorry, I meant to say I WOULDN’T use it for hybridizing.
I’ve used ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ in breeding years ago. I won’t use it anymore; the results were often tragically bad, and getting pollen was too much of a chore. That said, I did occasionally get some offspring that had remarkably good Blackspot resistance. I still have one seedling from ‘Rise ‘N’ Shine’ X ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ in the garden that grows into a 2.5 foot shrub with a growth habit much like its Bourbon parent, just on a smaller scale. It doesn’t get Blackspot, no matter how much disease is going on nearby. (Blackspot is a real problem in this climate: 80% of my collection gets it quite badly) You’d think crossing those two would give you highly Blackspot prone offspring, but not this one. Unfortunately, the foliar health is pretty much where the list of good qualities ends: the blooms, miniature in size, can’t make up their minds which parent’s bloom style they are trying to emulate, and the result is a messy blush pink bloom with a severe personality disorder.
Something to consider: sports are thought to have no different characteristics from their sport parent in terms of reproductive capabilities. The mutations that affect appearance apparently do not affect the reproductive tissue layer, so any mutation is unlikely to be represented in either the pollen or the ovules. In other words, ‘Souvenir de St. Annes’ won’t likely behave any differently as a breeder than ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’. Other than the fact that it will be easier to obtain pollen, that is 
Paul
I wanted to comment just a bit on Paul’s observation. In the case of New Dawn, it yields a lot of reblooming offspring with determinate (if somewhat long) shoots, suggesting that the mutation is transmissible. And I found that Climbing Crimson Glory (OP) gave only once-bloomers. The one I kept is a climber. So sometimes the mutation seems stable.
But while searching for something else a few weeks ago I came across a paper from 1951 by Zimmerman and Hitchcock at Boyce Thompson Institute. on “Rose sports from adventitious buds”. They found that root cutting adventitious buds of Souvenir ( a Talisman sport) gave back Talisman. and in the family of Briarcliff and Better Times you may get back Columbia. (The whole Ophelia group of flower color variants is likely to be that way I think .)
Seems as if what I read years ago is still correct, it all depends upon how deep the change occurs. Some are only skin deep, while others go to the bone.
Yeah, I imagine it depends on chimera mutation type.
Regarding Earth Kind Roses. I spent a very enjoyable afternoon with Dr. George this past summer and we toured several of the Earth Kind Test Gardens in the Dallas area. One point that Dr. George mentioned several times was at this point in time ‘the Earth Kind designation is for roses that are grown in Texas’. So if you purchase an EK rose and grow it in Texas it should do fine. However, no gaurantee’s if you grow it Michigan.
There are some EK trial gardens IN PROCESS now in other states and also other countries according to Dr. George.
Larry is right, of course. I meant to say that sport mutations usually don’t translate into a sexually transmissible trait, but if the mutation runs deep enough to affect the reproductive tissue layer, it can, as in ‘New Dawn’.