I’ve read (on here) that pollen parent can have effect on seed parent in various ways.
What differences will you see in your seed parent when matched with various pollen parents?
I was looking through hips from Lilian Austin. These ones are from the same plant, pollinated with different varieties.
The first ones pollinated (date recorded) are completely green, no sign of ripening. These were pollinated from an old rose I found (never figured out what rose it is).
The next were pollinated with Ramblin Red and are coloring up nicely, although I’ll give them a couple weeks in the Ziploc to be sure.
Another, pollinated a week or two later by English Roses is just beginning to color up.
Would the pollen effect the ripening this much, esp. the green by the old rose?
Would you treat them all the same, going by number of days?
Or is it possible the green ones may need a bit longer than the others due to pollen parent.
Lilian Austin hips may not give a lot of seeds or have a really high germination rate, but they have been fairly consistent for me before this.
Any thoughts or experience on this?
Thanks for the input!
Duane
Not really a direct answer to your question, but I have noticed that hips with fewer seeds might take longer to color up. So maybe if the pollen of that rose was weak, it made fewer seeds per hip, and therefore they’re ripening more slowly. My assumption is that the seed maturity is still just as far along as those in colored hips.
Thanks for the insight Joe. I hadn’t registered that, but memory seems to recognize that fact as I think back. I’m going to pay attention to that moving forward. And pollen parent could make that difference. I have noticed a difference in seed number from different pollens. Of course I have seen a great variance with some pollens, perhaps I wasn’t as meticulous as I thought when applying that pollen.
Thanks again!
Duane
I don’t recall ever reading a paper that discusses a pollen effect on seed production/ripening time. But back in the 1950s it was shown by a breeder (in NH?) that the male parent determined time to germination. One mother, several different pollens, average days to germ varied widely. Karl has the paper I think.
Number of seeds from different pollens depends on the general or specific combining ability of the pollen and egg parents. Most pollens on Silver Moon give very few seeds, but this year I tried a hybrid of New Dawn x a yellow mini which I mainly use as a mother. Got far better seed set per hip and hips per pollinations that any other combo I’ve tried. I assume that that common thread of wichuriana backgrounds allowed good matching of chromosomes, and hence production of seeds. Now to see if we can get decent germ rate, and repeat bloom.
Plant breeders talk about general and specific combining ability in production of hybrids. Some parents work really well with many others. So they have really good general combining ability. Others work really well with just one or a few others. So they may have a high specific combining ability. If we did enough crosses in all combinations I’m sure we’d see this in roses. But mostly we do less than 100 crosses (pollinations) with one pollen on one seed parent, and rarely test it on even 10 different seed parents.
Variance in seed #/hip is expected if the average is small, say 3/hip. Then 0-7 are all pretty common. Just statistics in action.
Thank you Larry! That gives me a lot to think about and digest.
Interesting the male determining length for hips. Makes sense Rambling Red would be shorter than an English Rose. Surprising to me though that an old rose would be longer than the English Rose. I wonder if different groups vary or just specific varieties. Since I don’t know the variety that doesn’t help, but will a damask vary from a moss rose, or Alba? Or is each variety different. I may have to experiment with others to compare of course, Joe, they look like they may have fewer seeds in them also. I guess I’ll see when I open them and count them.
Do any of you have experience with different old roses to share.
Aside from Ramblin Red, I noticed Above and Beyond had that effect, not only as seed parent but I think also as pollen.
Do Rugosa have that effect as pollen parent? I know their hips ripen really early. The seedlings from Therese Bugnet even sooner than others. Is that perhaps the other species influence?
Thanks again!
I’ve observed that R pomifera tends to have effect of early ripening in hips for which it is the pollen parent, just as it ripens incredibly fast as a mother, around 2 mo.
Probably there is a species effect, but once you mix a few you can really only talk of cultivars. We don’t really know the % of various species in most old roses except where we can see leaf shape, types of prickles, stem color, flower appearance. And these need not be linked to seed formation and ripening genes.
This is an interesting paper, but Risley got a bit tangled in words. He seems to have assumed that sprouting (appearing above the soil surface) is equivalent to germination. Not necessarily.
Two seedlings may germinate (begin emerging from the seed) at the same time, but one may grow faster and thus poke through the soil before its sibling.
Risley’s data didn’t make sense to me. Why should hardy varieties like ‘Max Graf’ and ‘Persian Yellow’ produce offspring that were quicker to germinate than those from ‘Diamond Jubilee’ (a seedling from ‘Marechal Niel’)? However, it does make sense that the first two pollen parents would give offspring that grow well at low temperatures. It would not be surprising that grandchildren of ‘Marechal Niel’ grew more slowly in the cold.
Here’s a similar example:
IHC2006: International Symposium on Ornamentals, Now!
SELECTION FOR EARLY FLOWERING, TEMPERATURE AND SALT TOLERANCE OF ZANTEDESCHIA AETHIOPICA ‘GREEN GODDESS’
K. Ngamau
Abstract: Zantedeschia, an important cut flower that shows high variability in plant height, flowering period and other characteristics when grown from seeds. Availability of variability, however, provides opportunity for the selection for such characteristics as early flowering, temperature or salt tolerance. In-vitro germination may be utilized in the selection for early germination under unfavourable conditions and selected seedlings rapidly multiplied by multiple shoot formation. This study described the selection procedures using early germinating seeds of Zantedeschia ‘Green Goddess’ on their flowering time, temperature and salt tolerance. The seeds were sown on in-vitro Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium at 20°C and 16h light; early germinating seeds transferred singly to new medium. For temperature tolerance, seeds were sown on media maintained at 10, 15 and 20°C. For salt tolerance, seeds were sown on medium containing 0, 40, 80, 120, 160 and 200 mmol/L NaCl. The selected seedlings were then multiplied in-vitro to develop clones, which were tested for flowering, temperature tolerance and salt tolerance against clones which germinated later. The results showed that clones, which were selected from early-germinated seedlings, grew faster, flowered earlier and produced more flowers than clones that germinated later. Early germinated seedlings at low temperatures achieved greater growth at lower night temperatures than those germinated at high temperatures. Clones selected after germination at higher levels of sodium chloride (NaCl) attained greater growth on media containing salt than those that germinated on salt free medium.
Getting back to roses, seedlings that pop up quickly during cold treatment are likely to be just as quick to sprout in the spring. Such plants are more prone to “winterkill” when they are zapped by early frosts. Note how slowly the offspring from the Brownells’ “Sub-zero” rose ‘Queen of the Lakes’ came up.
Larry,
This gets close to a matter that I have wondered about. Is the ripening and germination time for a given seed dependent upon its own genes, or is there a maternal effect?
I can understand that the ability to grow at low temperatures would probably be connected to the genes within the seed. But I would expect at least a little variation in “sprouting” time among the offspring of ‘Diamond Jubilee’ [Marechal Niel x Feu Pernet-Ducher].
Then there is this odd bit of info:
Jour. Roy. Hort. Soc. 21: 442-48 (1898)
Notes on Some Curiosities of Orchid Breeding
C. C. Hurst
(quoting T. L. Mead in Orchid Review, 4(47): 326. 1896) Laelia anceps pollen seems invariably to cut down time needed to ripen pods of Cattleya labiata group by about six months; while the pollen of C. labiata does not appreciably lengthen the time needed by L. anceps pods to ripen … Broughtonia sanguinea, which both with its own and with foreign pollen ripens its seeds in one-and-a-half to two months, has power to quicken the ripening of C. Bowringiana, with which it gave good seed in eight-and-a-half months."
The first cross mentioned suggests that ripening time is not determined by the genotypes of the seeds. In fact, it seems to be a case of xenia in the original sense: a maternal tissue (the seed capsule) being influenced by the foreign pollen.
I have also wondered what might happen if Cattleya labiata were given a mixture of pollen from a different variety of this species combined with that of Laelia anceps.
And for roses, how would a mixture of pollen from ‘Queen of the Lakes’ and ‘Max Graf’ behave?
I just found another related item:
IMMEDIATE INFLUENCE OF POLLEN: In Determining the Size and Time of Ripening of the Fruit of the Date Palm
ROY W. NIXON
Journal of Heredity, Volume 19, Issue 6, June 1928, Pages 241–255, IMMEDIATE INFLUENCE OF POLLEN | Journal of Heredity | Oxford Academic
Published: 01 June 1928
Abstract
Experimental data for three years in the Coachella Valley, Calif., with two years of supplementary tests in Arizona, chiefly in the Salt River Valley, have given consistent evidence that the time of ripening of date fruit, as well as the size of both fruit and seed, may be directly affected by the pollen used.* The possibility of being able to influence the time of ripening by the use of selected pollens is likely to be of vast importance in the development of the date industry in new regions. Where the seasonal margins are rather sharply defined a difference of ten days or two weeks, which has been repeatedly produced under experimental conditions by pollens from two seedling dactylifera males and demonstrated to be possible with pollens from many others, may be the difference between success and failure with certain varieties. And as a factor in determining the size of the fruit and seed the grower in the future will be able to use pollen with discretion as an aid to cultural practices in producing high-grade, standardized fruit.
What an interesting topic. Like Joe, I’ve noticed the more seed in a hip the more energy seems to be diverted there and the faster the ripening. Also, general hybrid vigor may be involved. In a past Gudin et al. paper they looked at pollinations done at different temperatures and besides impact of temperatures on speed of embryo development and later testa thickness and dormancy associations, there were differences between males on the same female for germination. It seems like the faster the embryo started growing the thinner the testa and better the germination later. Perhaps embryos with more inbreeding depression and/or wide crosses with hybrid breakdown grow slower and that slower development may slow the signal for resources being diverted to the hip and finishing ripening.
Hybrid Vigor vs. Hybrid breakdown How much further (past enough difference for hybrid vigor) causes break down
like miles apart, or just a bit more?
If hip ripening was faster with vigor and slower with breakdown could this be used as a general guess as to success of cross?
I’ve seen a lot of breakdown, thinking especially Rugosa crosses.
Thanks for all the input guys. I’ll a lot to chew on (and read to research now) on those long, dark winter days .
Duane
HORT SCIENCE 25(7):786-788. 1990.
Influence of Endocarp Thickness on Rose Achene Germination: Genetic and Environmental Factors
Serge Gudin et al.
Influence of temperature. The temperature of seed mother plant environments was on average 5.5C higher during the 12 weeks following the May pollination than following the March pollination. The rate of increase in ovule length appears to differ according to the pollination period (March or May) in > R. hybrida > CV. no. 364-73.D × > R. hybrida > CV. Jelrafloki (Fig. 2). Ovule development is more rapid for the maturation period following May pollination than for that following March. As a consequence, the embryos are visible earlier after May than after March pollination. Temperature is probably the principal determinate for this rate difference in development, although other climatic factors, such as irradiation, might also have an influence. The beneficial effect of a warm environment on embryo or true seed development has been demonstrated in numerous and diverse species (Le Deunff and Chaussat, 1969; Junttila, 1971; Thompson and Liu, 1973; Montegut, 1974; Braak, 1978). It is interesting to note that for equivalent reference stages, either when fecund ovules can be distinguished from nonfecund ones or when embryos become visible under a binocular lens, the ovule dimensions do not differ (P = 0.05; Student’s > t > test), regardless of maturation conditions (after May or March pollination). This fact agrees with results of Junttila (1971), who reported that dry weights of mature lilac seeds are only very slightly different according to different production temperatures. > Prunus avium > embryos submitted to diverse environments during maturation reach similar dimensions when fully mature (Braak, 1978). This author also showed that environmental temperature influence on embryo development rate is maximal at transition from “phase I” to “phase H” (Tukey, 1933). The first stage essentially corresponds to pericarp and nucellus development, whereas the second one corresponds to rapid embryo growth accompanied by endocarp hardening.
Achenes of identical genetic origin that matured after March or May pollination did not differ in either size of true seed section or in pericarp thickness (Table 2). However, both endocarp thickness and germination percentage were significantly different. Thus, the achenes that matured after the March pollination had both a thicker endocarp and lower germination than those that matured after May.
Our results demonstrate that the barrier presented by the endocarp is determined during true seed early development; the slower this development is, the more germination will be limited. We hypothesize that competition probably exists between true seed development rate and thickness of the physical barrier represented by the endocarp. Nitsch (1951) has already noted such a competition between developing seeds and ovary tissues in tomato, and Norstog (1961) observed a similar phenomenon in barley.
This is interesting, but seems to be just a bit misleading because everblooming roses of complex ancestry may be exhibiting traits that are directly adaptive for one or another of the remote ancestors. For example, if a plant is “tricked” into prematurely early flowering, a thickened endocarp might delay germination enough to get the seedling growing in the proper season. [That’s not a carefully reasoned example, and I won’t try to defend it.]
In other words, a trait that is adaptive in one species and habitat, may appear mysterious in a complex hybrid growing in a garden.
Adaptation in Plant Breeding (1997) pp. 82-83
edited by P.M.A Tigerstedt
Adaptive properties of Picea abies progenies are influenced by environmental signals during sexual reproduction
Øystein Johnsen & Tore Skrøppa
Full-sib comparisons
In order to give conclusive evidence that progenies are influenced by climate and weather during sexual reproduction, more precise comparisons between progenies from the same parents produced in contrasting environments were needed. The same controlled crosses were thus performed to create identical full-sib families under different climatic conditions, both at different latitudes in Finland (Skrøppa et al., 1994), and inside a heated greenhouse vs. outside in a nearby seed orchard (Johnsen et al., 1995). The progenies that were sexually reproduced under warm conditions (southern latitudes or inside the greenhouse) were generally less frost hardy in the autumn than their full-sibs from the cold conditions. From these studies we could conclude that Norway spruce progenies were influenced both by the genetic constitution of their parents and by environment during sexual reproduction. This has also been found in Pinus sylvestris, although the effects of the parental environment seem to be less pronounced in this species (Lingren & Wang. 1986; Dormling & Johnsen, 1992; Andersson. 1994; Lindgren & Wei. 1994).
I was rereading the above paper and found this bit that relates to the gene-splicing of petunias discussed in another thread:
“Virtually no information is available about rapid genomic changes or epigenetic effects in spruce. Genomic imprinting is, however, being increasingly accepted as a fundamental and widespread process that determines, in ways not predicted by the laws of Mendelian inheritance, whether a particular gene will be expressed or not (Matzke & Matzke, 1993). Interestingly, Meyer et al. (1992) found that environmental factors influenced 35S promoter methylation of a maize A1-gene construct in transgenic petunia and its colored phenotype. While blossoms on field-grown plants flowering early in the season were predominantly red, later flowers on the same plants showed weaker coloration. The reduction of the A1-specific phenotype correlated with methylation of the 35S promoter. Moreover, they found that the stability of pigmentation correlated with the time of seed production. The A1-gene construct was rather insensitive to DNA methylation in progeny from flowers of young parental plants produced early in the season, but became susceptible to methylation within progeny from subsequent later crosses. Similar observations have been made in nontransgenic Zea mays where methylation was more pronounced in upper ears and tassels (Federoff & Banks, 1988). So far, we can only speculate that such gene regulation, caused by activation or deactivation of certain genes by environmental conditions during reproduction, regulate the phenotypic expression of adaptive traits in Norway spruce.” http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Heredity/JohnsenSpruce1997.html
And this reminded me of a much earlier observation by William Herbert (1837):
“The striped sorts [of Camellias] have usually more white in their flowers when they flower early in the spring, and it seems that the seed ripened earliest in the year is the most apt to yield white or pied seedlings.” http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Heredity/Herbert/HerbertCamellias1837.html
It would be interesting to learn weather early vs. late pollinations involving striped roses varied in their variegation, as well as in the thickness of the pericarp.
I was sorting through hips to check them and went through a bag of hips from The Generous Gardener. It has been disease free for me (obviously others may have had other experience in their locations) and it has survived the winter for me. It dies back, but its vigor brings it back quickly. I placed pollen from Above and Beyond and Ramblin Red on it, along with several others.
I noticed that both the hips from Above and Beyond as well as Ramblin Red are coloring up nicely. Several of the hips are vary large, several are smaller. The hips from the other pollens are still green, although look like they may just be starting to color. I have noticed this same trend on the others also. I guess that is something to be glad for when we have shorter growing seasons. Although perhaps the other hips are far enough along, even though they are not changing color yet.
Duane
Acta Horticulturae 961(961): 593-598 (Oct 2012)
Immature seed rescue and abscissic acid quantification in Rosa hybrida L. suggest early and transient endodormancy.
Luca Pipino, Marie-Christine Van Labeke, Andrea Mansuino
Abstract: Breeding is a long process in the rose industry. Premature death of developing embryos due to incompatibility and delayed germination, caused by seed dormancy, are the main causes. Immature seed rescue may offer a valuable way to increase hybridisation efficiency, to introduce genotypes with interesting ornamental traits, and to shorten time needed to obtain seedlings. In this study, in vitro immature seed rescue was carried out in Rosa hybrid L. Seeds from 7 to 28 days after pollination (DAP) were sterilized and placed onto two germination media: Murashige and Skoog medium (full strength macro and micro nutrients and vitamins, MS0) and MS0 with 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP; 2.5 mg/L) and gibberellic acid 3 (GA3; 0.5 mg/L). Four different conditions of light and temperature were applied. At 15 and 30 DAP, the abscisic acid (ABA) concentration was quantified in fully formed embryos of two different genotypes of hybrid roses. Preliminary data showed that only seeds harvested at 21 DAP germinated in both media, this after 2 months of in vitro culture. This result is supported by the observation that basal levels of ABA were found in embryos at 30 DAP. The general role of ABA on preventing precocious germination and vivipary suggests an early and transient endodormancy in embryos of hybrid roses. The integration of these two approaches with the aim of defining protocols for precocious in vitro germination and investigating the pathway of dormancy in R. hybrid is highlighted. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256144190_Immature_seed_rescue_and_abscissic_acid_quantification_in_Rosa_hybrida_L_suggest_early_and_transient_endodormancy
Thank you Karl for that: I never would have thought of being able to at such a young age! I excised seeds that were full age and then had been in fridge but still weren’t germinating. It worked for some of them. But to think of so soon after pollinations… the possibilities.
Duane
“the male parent determined time to germination” (thanks Larry)
I have three different seed parents that have germinated seeds from Ramblin Red pollen.
Each of these had pollen from several other parents tested also, none of which have germinated yet.
Not big enough numbers to say much, but certainly seems to agree with this person’s findings.
These are anywhere from one to four weeks ahead of other pollen parents. I’ll see if and when these other seeds germinate to compare.
Duane