David, I have used it as a pollen parent. The cross is Carefree Beauty X Mutabilis. It is registered as Chireno and is being offered by Chamblees roses in Tyler. You can take a look at it at Chamblees web catalog or my listing on HelpMeFind. Chireno also sets hips and I have obtained one or two OP seedlings last year, and hope to have it be receptive to pollen this year. I have been unable to have sucess with pollen on Mutabilis but will continue to try, as it is a great rose. Ray Ponton
Jim, did your Plaisanterie seeds germinate? I’m thinking of buying it, but would like to know how it worked for you as a seed parent.
Rob
Weeks has a 2008 Mutabilis-type introduction coming out called ‘Watercolors’. The flowers look good. It’s (Santa Claus x Flower Carpet) x Betty Boop
Tom is doing some innovative stuff. I’m glad. I hope it sells.
Searching Happy Chappy, this thread came up. I saw the plant first hand recently, and, ironically, remembering that someone had asked I was thinking, “Now that might be interesting to cross with Mutabilis.” I did not recall that you had already posted that thought here in this thread, David, but would like to put in my vote.
HC starts out with sulfurous overtones deepening towards cerise much like Mutabilis. It is a ground cover rose, and likely has some interesting species genes in it, though listed simply as seedling x seedling. It sets hips quite readily from what I see, has compact growth, and might counter some of mutabilis’ poorer traits.
I wouldn’t expect the next big thing to come from such a cross, but as a diversion, I think it could be a fun one…
Bengale Sanguine blew as a seed parent for me. Like 20 tries this spring, and they all fell off. Oh well… at trying to see if it mixes with yellow very well…
Rob, I just saw your question about Plaisanterie. It sets hips well with diploid pollen. I don’t know how they germinate. I lost all of my seeds last year, over 3800 of them, to a fungus. I’m trying again this year. You have to be an optimist to be a rose hybridizer.
You really do, lol. Or annoyingly persistent
Thanks Jim, maybe I’ll get Plaisanterie next year. Sorry to hear about your lost seeds. 3800!!
I know many people here have been using mutabilis for a while. I personally don’t grow it, but last year I managed to get some pollen from it and put it on the only reliable seed parent that was blooming at that time, the Wedgwood Rose.
I now have 3 the Wedgwood Rose × Mutabilis seedlings. All three have already bloomed, two were some kind of greenish white while the third one was a uniform pink (darker than any OP TWR I have grown).
What I’m wondering is if in your experience mutabilis’ color shifting is evident in the first blooms or if it takes some time to develop.
The pink one looks particularly promising. It had a very large first bloom and just a couple weeks later it had 5 more buds growing. It’s double (more than 40 petals and a lot of petaloids) and has remained quite healthy in what has been the wettest spring of the last 170 years. It’s also the most vigorous of the bunch.
Hi jAc123,
I gathered about 50 seeds of OP Mutabilis last year and only one germinated.
It wanted to bloom way too much, way too soon, so I removed the first three buds and then all but one in the next clusters, for fear it would bloom itself to death.
The first blooms that I allowed to open had apricot buds but opened plain white. I kept it because it seems to want to be smaller than Mutabilis, and has good fragrance (possible contribution from neighbor Marie Pavie?).
A few months later the blooms are showing a nice range of color change although not as intense as Mutabilis.
So I guess it can take a little while, but I would think some change should appear within the first few months, especially with proper sunlight.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
My seedlings are less than a month away from their first bloom, so I guess we still have time. My main concern was about it being a 4n×2n cross, so the mutabilis influence should be less evident than in a diploid. There’s always the possibility of it being a tetraploid from unreduced diploid pollen, but I guess it is most likely a triploid.
The pink one looks interesting enough to become a keeper regardless of it changing color, but the white ones were just bland. I’ll keep them to see how they mature though.
I have a dozen or so OP seedlings from ‘Mutabilis’ a few cm tall, and three have buds already!!
FOUR!! Also one lone budded ‘Ballerina’ seedling, and even one ‘Abraham Darby’ seedling has a wee bud.
Didn’t really expect much from the AD seed as many on here thought it a failure as a seed parent, but useful for its pollen. Nature finds a way, I guess. Ah, Jeff Goldblum.