Also Robert, these sorts of precious crosses, where there is little achene to speak of, are great candidates for embryo culture. It can save years…The other thing embryo work can do, is confirm a possibility that there are no embryos in the achenes (ie. infertile achene despite normal appearance)… it is good to know this sort of thing early in the piece, to know what you’re actually dealing with.
“It would be nice to get a remontant diploid clino. line established.”
Done here my rugosa, bracteata, foliolosa plus lower recurrent hybrids x Viru Clinobrac op pollen 2007 crosses: all nice more or less compact recurrent small leaved and flowered, varied fertility and some with the foliolosa x bracteata difficulty to open flowers.
Congrats Pierre. I’ll bet these are fascinating.
Pierre,
What have your experiences been on using your clones of Viru (clinophylla/bracteata) x op, or Viru (clinophylla) x op as a seed parent?
The plant that Pierre referred to is one of the best of the Hybrid Clinophyllas I have grown. It has been a fairly good repeater for me now that it is three years old, it sets seed easily (although this is the first year I am attempting to germinate these, so all bets are off as to viability of these seeds) and appears to be much more freeze tolerant than the species parent. (Recent freeze events did considerable damage to my two plants of R. clinophylla, but this seedling is alive right to the cane tips)
I have propagated this plant and have one or two pieces I am willing to send out to anyone who wants to use it in breeding. Bear in mind that I am limited to sharing these with folks here in the US, in observance with international agriculture regulations.
(R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata) x OP 3 days jar culture
Ok, time to plant this one, now.
(R.Clinophylla x OP), 2 days jar culture… The progress of this , the best embryo of the (R.Clinophylla x OP) batch is still not what I would call rapid, however it is developing…many of the remaining 13 embryos in this jar have done NO visible growing at all, most still appear marginally viable…
If you are interested in this stuff, have a look up at the picture I posted on Tue, Sep 22, 2009 (near the top of this thread). At a similar stage of embryo development for 6 days then you see the same sort of development at 3 days now.
I suppose a lot of this accelerated growth that is happening now, is due to the fact it is mid-summer as opposed to early spring.
This is also evidence, that rose embryos can be germinated all round the year, in my climate.
“What have your experiences been on using your clones of Viru (clinophylla/bracteata) x op…”
I grow seedlings raised from seeds Viru sent me as (clinophylla x bracteata) x op. All plants being rather uniform and quite different from bracteata: much smaller leaves, thinner stems, non hooked spines, flower and hip comparable to bracteata ones. Repeats like bracteata.Quite fertile.
A tough plant little bothered by desease. Here autumn growth do not stop before all younger parts and leaves are frosted.
As I never grew clinophylla, comparison is impossible.
Beside using its pollen, I raised a few little OP progenies from isolated plants. Obviously most seeds were selfed.
Thanks Pierre, for the information.
The clinophylla embryos continue to be problematic, unlike their clinophylla x bracteata cousins, where 3 out of the 6 are now planted as seedlings.
Here is the same clinophylla embryo I have been tracking all along, now at 3 days of jar culture. If it decides to grow a root, it should germinate ok. There were initially 14 clinophylla embryos in this jar, I have discarded 6 of those, as they were disintegrating, even though they had been extracted without damage. I am not surpirsed, as a lot of these never looked 100% alive right from the start.
clinophylla x op, day 3 jar culture:
George,
I was given R. clinophylla seeds about 8 years ago and I planted them in soil 1/4" deep just like all the rest of my seed. They germinated with no special care and I got 14 plants out of 20 seeds. I expect there may be instances in which embryo rescue may inhibit normal germination, so best to use it only when normal techniques have proven ineffective.
Paul,
I had nothing better to do that day…LOL…So I just did the extractions wanting super fast results…
I plan on just germinating achenes the normal way, come this winter.
Probably a more time efficient way of utilising embryo work, could be to utilise it after achenes have been given sufficient time to germinate the normal way, (and only of course if they are “super precious”).
\
Of course, there is no logic to doing embryo work on easy to germinate seed, except if you just want to do it for fun, or practice or curiosity.
Also I soon plan to post here, the % germinations when I am sure of the outcomes.
This current situation offers a chance to do a small scale parallel comparison study with the same batch of achenes planted immediately without extractions (even though I guess the numbers planted are going to be a whole lot more than the numbers that were cultured).
I am just interested in this idea for reasons of putting this whole embryo thing to a real test…it could turn out to be the crap option in the case of clinophylla x op… LOL!!
George,
It would be worthwhile to do a test like this using a control group of the same seeds, planted in the standard way to see which did better, which germinated faster and what percentage of each group resulted in a seedling.
Paul, too bad there aren’t another 20 achenes of this ‘clinophylla’ batch to do a comparative planting as a control, here in my climate.
I know I said…“embryo culture could turn out to be the crap option in the case of clinophylla x op… LOL!!”…
However, to be honest, here is my real take on this whole thing:
With embryo culture, I have noticed too any times now, that embryos that look dull and transluscent pre-culture are hard to convert to pearly white “active” types, and pretty much always fail the culture. In this ‘clinophylla’ batch, I was able to predict the ones that were going to live right from the start, and these are the few that are still trying to grow, now.
If you put a whole lot of bad embryos you know are very questionable in the culture along with those you know are definitley viable, as I did with ‘clinophylla’ (the seed was too precious to just throw out ANYTHING, LOL), the results are skewed to the bad end of the spectrum, and the “failure” is fairly predictable before the culture starts. In reality it is just non-viable embryos being included in the total count, which is ok. The only problem with doing this is that those bad embryos may carry fungus and infect the whole colony, so that is why I normally dont even culture the questionable types.
Here is another example of the predictability of the culture in advance…I knew, for example before the ‘clinophylla x bracteata’ culture started, that the embryos were all excellent looking right from the start, and indeed that culture is probably going to be 100% successful…in under one week I now have 5/6 of them potted up, and growing in their pots as green leaved seedlings…now that is FAST…LOL
Anyway, now in case these questionable ‘clinophylla’ embryos are carrying covert fungus on them (no visible evidence of fungus yet), I decided to isolate them in a second jar, last night, and cleaned out the original jar where I have resetteld the more viable ones.
Here is the best ‘clinophylla’ embryo, as it appears this morning, day 4 of its jar culture:
You know, I really should have planted 10 achenes and cultured 10 achenes of the clinophylla…what a shame I didn’t think to do this as a nice little comparative study, it would have been fun to watch.
Embryo culture for rose achene is fantastic, but is only ever required RARELY, (thank goodness!)
Here is the last of the colony of 6 (clinophylla x bracteata) x op, at day 5 of its jar culture, and miles behind its sibblings in growth (the others are all officially green-leaved seedlings in potting mix now, as I mentioned earlier on today).
Who knows, maybe this one was created by a bee that pollinated it with pollen from some remontaant modern rose (wishful thinking), or from some other exotic rose species, in Viru’s garden…speculation is rife here, I know LOL. It is all in the name of fun, anyway.
In any case, this does illustrate, yet again, how the rate of growth can range from super fast to super slow from members of the same species and even from sibblings of the same hip…I suppose this is very natural, and should be expected to be part of what we normally encounter.
Post pictures of the leafed-up seedlings!
(clinophylla x bracteata) x op.
1st germination potted on day 3 of jar culture, as seen today after 2 days growing in the pot.