I was curious if I’m alone in this thought…
When contemplating crosses i would like to make, I often look at potential parents based on the pedigree as much as the actual garden performance of the plant. My reasoning is, quite simply, that so much of the genome of any given plant is not expressed, it might make sense to consider the potentially unexpressed portion of the plant’s genetic makeup which it may have inherited. Thus a “good” rose with a lot of awesome ancestors might have as much merit as a prospective parent as would a really good, if not awesome, rose with some lame ancestors – a situation which might demonstrate a sort of familial flash in the pan, so to speak. Similarly, a rose with really great “sisters” might also warrant consideration despite its own shortcomings.
In the lottery of gene combinations, which approach do folks seem to feel is more appropriate and logical? I suppose pre-HelpMeFind, studying such lineages (ad nauseum) was not quite as viable an approach to planning crosses…
This is exactly what I try to do Philip.
In regard to pedigrees pre-HMF, they DID exist but many of them were strung together by individual hybridizers. I’ve seen hand written pedigrees.
Ralph Moore has one posted at Sequoia. Needles to say they look to be a laborious endeavor.
Tens of years ago an old and successfull plant breeder said me that most outstanding vars are from poor progenies and rather unexpectable parentages…
Strong words I cannot confirm nor contradict…
Pedigree gives no guarantee. Hability to transmit qualities is quite variable. Many outstanding vars are poor parents when others are good. A breeders tool I use is making a progeny test that is either sowing OP seeds or better pollinating with mixed pollen to observe a progeny in order to know the mother hability to transmit wanted qualities.
Another discrimination can be made looking at how successfull this var has been for others. I.e. how many seedlings were introduced. Even if a new introduction its breeder was able to work with it for six to ten years. That eventually may only point to a fashionable and new feature that could be commonplace in a few years…
Practically breeders often use siblings of introduced vars. I.e. with better fertility or germinability or with easy to overcome faults. For a “hot” feature initially concerned siblings pollen may be mixed.
Purely from a genetics point of view pedigrees offer far more than just the promise of a healthy/beautiful/vigourous etc plant. I think people should be paying more attention to pedigrees to try and verfiy inheritance patterns. Combine this with research in identifying and naming which gene is at which loci and how many variations of these genes exist and which genes have effects that could be called econimically/aesthetically important and maybe we could make some more predicatble gains. As a complete newbie to this is seems that a lot of rose breeding is hit-and-miss or suck-it-and-see and this is unusual to me. I know rabbit genetics inside and out and have been breeding show rabbits for about 22 years and developed new breeds etc and am learning poultry genetics and the genes which we consider to be important (whilst acknowledging there are a large % of genes that aren’t phenotypically expressed) are well known and documented and you can easily choose a desired effect and select breeding individuals to achieve this end. I realise that polyploidy maked this more difficult but studying a pedigree can give you insight as to what has happened and what might happen in a given circumstance.
There are a lot of rose breeders that have high degrees and know a lot about plant breeding. Many breeding teams are quite numerous, educated, have ample budgets and persevere for generations. They often collaborate with Universitary research teams.
Annualy at least some 4 millions new seedlings are grown. Just consider how little true betterments result.
Rose are certainly the most studied ornamental plant and most bred for the last two centuries. Truth is that very little is known.
While animals and plants are true breeding; garden roses being vegetatively propagated complex hybrids do not.
Be it from polyploidy or being quite remote from the original and different adaptation species.
There are features whose heritability is said to be known. Modifiers and dosage effects are said to explain the ample variation in expressions observed. Distortions of expectable ratios are said to be from gametes elimination and low viability and germinability of seeds. Some say supergenes explain how much some vars faults are prevalent in progenies.
My contribution to next RHA journal is about this topic.
“I think people should be paying more attention to pedigrees to try and verify inheritance patterns. Combine this with research in identifying and naming which gene is at which loci and how many variations of these genes exist and which genes have effects that could be called economically/aesthetically important and maybe we could make some more predictable gains. As a complete newbie to this is seems that a lot of rose breeding is hit-and-miss or suck-it-and-see and this is unusual to me. I know rabbit genetics inside and out and have been breeding show rabbits for about 22 years and developed new breeds etc and am learning poultry genetics and the genes which we consider to be important, well known and documented, and you can easily choose a desired effect and select breeding individuals to achieve this end”.
I respectfully disagree with you Simon. I do think science, predictability and pedigree has its own merit, however; I am also one for big surprises. Since I am not playing with mammalian genes, (as a good friend of mine once put it), I wish not to be limited by my imagination 
Big surprises are OK so long as you can duplicate them. I guess having an animal breeding background one is constantly under the microscope from (and rightly so IMO) animal welfare organisations that oppose the breeding of any animal due to the high rate of abandonment, abuse and necessary euthanasia. So when we breed we must be able to make predictable gains without playing the numbers game because all those surplus progeny must then be either rehomed (and hope for the best) or humanely destroyed. Plant breeders have not, I feel, been under such scrutiny. I can be relatively cavalier about culling roses that don’t meet up to my standards and so can afford to raise far greater numbers. Breeding with a particular goal in mind and understanding the mechanisms behind their inheritance is a great way of unlocking your imagination too and your pedigrees are a useful tool to achieve this. When I mentioned this it was not so much aimed at those highly educated researchers because their jobs are highly motivated by the science behind it, but more at the backyard breeders like myself who have an interest in breeding new and better roses who are not bound by having to meet, through their breeding, financial benchmarks etc. For example, one of my goals is to breed a miniature or micro mini rose with rugosa type leaves and rugosa type habit, vigour and health. I see a plant like that to have potential as a relatively low maintenance border plant. If I know that miniature statue is dominant then I can plan my crosses to accommodate this (looking at the pedigree will also often reveal heterogeneity of statue too). I’d now like to know what the inheritance of rugosa type leaves is now and I bet by looking back at pedigrees with rugosa in the background I can get a pretty good idea of how it occurs.
I think the initial intent of the starting post was to raise the point of not banking on the pedigree too much, and on this I agree but that I feel is missing the point of what the pedigree is most useful as and I can thoroughly recommend people study the pedigrees more closely to reveal the secrets of inheretance. In rabbits I would not buy a rabbit without a pedigree because it is a record of its genetic history and from that with a little logical reasoning you can reasonably work out the genotypes at most loci of interest and how best to use them. Why should roses be any different?
Regarding the inheritance of rugosa traits. From my reading and from my experience, crosses with rugosas and non rugosas give offspring that look mainly like one or the other parent instead of getting offspring with a continuous blend of the features of the 2 parents. As an example please look at the 2 offspring of Simon Fraser and Sir Thomas Lipton at the following web sites:
http://picasaweb.google.com/HAKuska/HenrySRoses/photo#5070017929425146274
http://picasaweb.google.com/HAKuska/HenrySRoses/photo#5070017955194950082
Philip, I have certainly noticed that “okay” roses can produce very nice seedlings and really nice (and even very fertile) roses only producing inferior seedlings. The pedigrees are helpful, but in my opinion they only suggest what “this” particular seedling “may” produce. Sister seedlings from the same cross can produce very different populations of seedlings. I guess it might be that one of the sisters got a better set of genes…
Pierre, I tend to look at prospective parents similar to what you describe. Let them produce OP seedlings and see how they behave. Important here too is seeing how well they produce hips, how many seeds per hip that they produce and how well the particular rose’s seeds germinate.
Simon, roses do seem to be very complex in the way that they pass on their traits. I think with animals like rabbits for instance, the animal body shape and disease resistance, for example, are not too variable (at least from a breeders point of view - please forgive me if I am sounding ignorant about rabbit breeding). Then you add the ear shapes, colors, patterns, and so on. Roses though less complex than rabbits have a lot of undesirable traits that are always showing up that ruin what might be an otherwise nice rose (too disease prone, or unexciting color, and a multitude of other undesirable traits). In my experience, with roses, what it comes down to is a big job of trying to eliminate as many undesirable traits as possible. It makes getting an excellent rose something of a very difficult balancing act (trying to get all of the good genes together in one plant when so many undesirable traits exist).
With rabbits, even an ugly one still makes a cute bunny!
Jim Sproul
…the runts of the litter, awwwww! I bet those bunnies are real cute; I saw them at the pet store the other day with all kinds of color patterns…hard to resist!
I was just wondering, how can we better visualize the problems of rose breeding? Perhaps this will help…
Modern roses, as has been mentioned, are like muts. They are a very complex mixture of a wide range of genetic backgrounds. Mix in the fact that you are often dealing with tetraploids, the possibilities in crosses are astronomical.
Breeding for an excellent rose might be something like breeding for a beautiful Love Bird - BUT you would be doing it by starting out with a bunch of birds that were the result of crossing chickens with eagles, and ostriches with parrots, and penguins with chickadees, and turkeys with birds of paradise…and…
I know that there are incompatibilities with the above examples, but the point is, roses are a very mixed lot. Because of that, it is difficult to make predictions about crosses (not that we shouldn’t try, or that we don’t begin with a goal in mind). And more often than not, we (at least I am) are surprised with the results. Sometimes, if we are lucky it is a very pleasant surprise!
Jim Sproul
Yeah, bunnies are cute! But the owner of the petstore isn’t so cute at all. When the bunnies are to big for sale and didn’t sold, they end up in dogfood or something. Those lovely cute bunnies…