Commander Gillette, 67-305 and 77-361 are growing in Huntington Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California 91108. Budsticks will be sent to rosarians having understocks in return for any modest donation to the Huntington Rose Research Fund. Letters may be addressed to the Curator of the gardens.
In December of 1986, since writing the above, I have received two rooted cuttings of R. kordesii from Dr. Felicitas Svejda, Agriculture Canada, Research Station, Ottawa, Ontario; I shall be glad to furnish budsticks of this rose to interested rosarians.
We return now to the crosses of the type A1 x Commander Gillette, where Ai denotes a member of the group A, and Commander Gillette has been subjected to the cosmetic change described. A small percentage of the seedlings of this cross should be free of thorns, bristles and roughness on the midribs. Several successive selfings of each of these should produce one or more plants homozygous with respect to each of the three traits. We repeat this routine for each member of group A. All the roses so obtained from a group B. Our final group G comes by selecting from B the plants with outstanding resistance to blackspot.
To further reduce the labor of the operation just described, it might be best to use the reverse crosses, Commander Gillette x Ai, and mix the pollens of the Ai.
Of the group G we can say that each rose in it has high resistance to blackspot, is homozygous with respect to freedom from thorns, bristles and roughness of the leaf midribs, and, last but not least, carries genes of four of Nature