I made some cuttings from a friend who doesn’t know the name of this rose. I’m not even sure it is a rose. It stood between Purezza and a Frau Dagmar. Could anyone ID it perhaps? It grew as a massive climber 4 metres plus in height and it didn’t have any flowers. I don’t think it is remontant, but it is late in the season
Evidently that’s Rosa bracteata.
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I’ve grown R. bracteata for more than 20 years and currently have four plants of it. It’s naturalized in parts of the southern U.S. and my original plants were wild collected (suckers). I also have two plants grown from seed. That looks nothing like what I know as bracteata. Don’t know what it might be. Sorry.
Mark
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It may not be R. bracteata itself, but is absolutely a hybrid of R. bracteata.
If you don’t mind my asking, what do you see here that convinces you that this is a bracteata hybrid? I’ve always used bracteata for pollen, so there’s always a chance of self pollination instead of actual crosses. I’ve never been able to see much if any bracteata in the possible hybrids. I currently have 8 in various stages of maturity and have grown a number of others in the past. There are none of them that I can look at and say definitively that they’re hybrids. What do I look for?
Mark
This is R. bracteata in my greenhouse. There’s no mistaking the cane, thorn and foliage style.
Pollen of R. bracteata will almost always produce seedlings by pseudogamous apomixis, meaning that none of the R. bracteata genes are in the resulting seedlings. This is why Ralph Moore found it so very difficult to get a true Bracteata hybrid for all of his efforts. Bracteata traits are abundantly evident in the first generation hybrids, should you be lucky enough to create a true hybrid.
Even Ralph’s ‘Muriel’ tended to create a lot of apomictic seedlings when I used it.
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I went out and took a few photos of one of my plants this morning. Please excuse the poor quality. I’m a lousy photographer. Stems on mine seem to be smoother than on yours or the original photo. While it’s hard to judge scale from these photos, leaflets on mine seem to be smaller, more widely spaced and of a slightly different shape. Natural variation?
Mark
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All I see in the photos is a degree of natural variation of the species, and I believe the cuttings the OP has presented are likely R. bracteata as well.
I stand by my remarks about the species and its tendency to produce apomictic seedlings when used as a pollen parent.
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Would it be likely to be apomictic as the mother plant?
I’d like to add onto your question @James_D, is there some way to overcome pseudogamous apomixis @paulbarden? I read that it can be overcome by inducing stress in the plant, but I doubt it’s that simple.
(Also for my cuttings pictured above, the plant didn’t receive any care for years, so maybe it could have affected the general appearance of it, like the lack of glossy leaves like in Mark’s pictures above).
@James: Good luck getting R. bracteata to set seed using pollen from something other than itself!
@HighVeldRoseGrower I know of no technique to avoid it, no. I suspect it’s entirely down to luck to end up with a true bracteata hybrid.
My plant of R. bracteata has semi-glossy foliage. There is a lot of variation in the species’ physical traits. My plant has foliage that closely resembles that shown in your photo.
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I’ve certainly seen things that made me question if there was any bracteata in my supposed hybrids. I have 5 seedlings from this spring from bracteata pollen on an unknown rambler. Two of them had juvenile bloom, and one has single, blood-red blooms. I have two older plants from bracteata pollen on R. foliolosa that are large, sprawling plants with single white blooms, one with excellent rebloom. I’d be tempted to call them definite hybrids except for the fact that almost every seedling I’ve raised from that foliolosa, regardless of the other parent, has been a large, sprawling plant with single white blooms. It’s no wonder I have no hair left.
Mark
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I’m sure it would take several years of effort, but this seems like a really interesting path towards making dihaploids outside of a laboratory setting. I’ve read that using pollen from a different Rosaceae species could theoretically trigger this kind of parthenogenesis similar to how French researchers used irradiated pollen. Using r. bracteata sounds way more realistic, at least compared to 500 times the lethal dose of gamma radiation.
This spring out of curiosity I put some Mermaid pollen on a self-incompatible diploid species, fully expecting it to abort immediately. It managed to create one single seed. Doubtful it will germinate, but if it does I should be able to tell almost immediately if it has Mermaid genes.
I’m going to freeze some Mermaid pollen to toy around with until it cools down enough to contemplate making the drive down the OK/TX border to try and forage a true bracteata specimen.
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Just saw the McCartney rose in a garden in France on holiday, was looking spectacular. All the Meilland, Kordes and Austin hybrids were struggling In the heatwave but this hybrid was looking brilliant
I have bracteata in bloom right now, can collect pollen.
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Was the rose you saw The McCartney Rose (‘MEIzeli’, a hybrid tea), or the Macartney rose (R. bracteata)? Aside from sounding superficially similar, they aren’t very much alike, although both have noteworthy merits as breeding parents.
Stefan
I saw bracteata. It was stunning in the heatwave, I imagine it would be less so in warmer weather. Might be my favourite species rose