From the day this seedling germinated (3 months ago) and it revealed its small red furry hypocotyl, it appeard totally unlike any of its other four R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata buddies, all of which had smooth green hypocotyls…(they were all germinated using the jar embryo culture method - refer to the “Can anyone identify this red climber” thread and read posts from around Jan 14 2010, if you want to see the details of that embryo culture).
It has grown much faster than the other four R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata. It has already grown a stem with no thorns, and is starting to shoot out multiple basal stems from low buds, trying to “bush out”. I would have expected to see thorns on the stems at this stage of the stem development (like I have seen already on the two R. Clinophylla x OP).
The most striking differnce is the large size of its leaves compared to all the other seedlings…I keep looking at them and think tetraploid!! Also, their shape is of a modern rose leaf, nothing like the much smaller oval shaped leaves of the R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata, or R. Clinophylla x OP seedlings I have.
I will post pictures of these seedlings when I get my hands on a camera to use outdoors. I dont want to pull off leaves to photograph with my webcam, as it would be bad for the seedlings to lose leaves at this stage of their development.
For now, I’ll re-post the pictures of this seedling and one of its other four (“typical”) R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata sibblings, as they appeared soon after potting them up from their jar culture:
Here is one of the other four R. Clinophylla x R. Bracteata. As it turns out, all of these others had the same smooth green hypocotyl.
These other four R. Clinophylla x R. Bracteata seedlings also continue to look fairly uniform in their appearance as they grow. Their leaves look a tad more like Bracteata than Clinophylla, but it is probably too early to give such definitive details. They are at the point of nearly throwing up a stem, and I expect they are going to show thorns, just like their R.Clinophylla cousin seedlings.
I should add that all of the twelve R.Clinophylla x R.Bracteata seeds I received looked very similar to eachother, and all seemed structurally similar when opened up.
One possible thing against the idea of it being a tetraploid is that (I assume/speculate) its embryo should have appeared significantly larger than the embryos of the other four, which was not the case.
It would be fun to learn to do rose chromosome counts!
Both my clinophylla x bracteata seedlings from the same batch have red hypercotyles… I belive it is the clinophylla influence. Not enough leaves yet to compare size. Don’t rule out the effect of environment (eg. light levels).
This picture is pretty much how my four “typical” (R. bracteata x R. clinophylla)x OP are looking, ok there are slight variations of course, but basically you get the picture?!
They have just started to throw prickly stems, as expected.
Now, in this picture the seedling to the left is the seedling I am talking about. It has no sharp prickles, and it is about to flower apically, which is NOT what I would expect from a 3 month old (R.bracteata x R.clinophylla)xOP.
The seedling on its right is one of its four other sibblings of (R.clinophylla x R.bracteata), for comparison.
As a further comparison, here is a picture of one of my two R.clinophylla x OP seedlings. Both are fairly similar to eachother in appearance. This is the faster grower of the two.
All of today’s posted pictures were taken this morning.
I am thinking this could be one of Viru’s tetraploid bracteata / Commender Gillette hybrid seeds that somehow got mixed up in the batch, since he also sent some of this to Simon. The relative lack of prickles and the early flowering make me suspicious, but it is just pure speculation at this stage.
To be more accurate, I am referring here to a Bracteata line apparently known as ‘Basye’s Bracteata’ according to information Simon shared on our forum a few months back (in the link below refer to Simon’s post on Wed Feb 10, 2010).
The plants physiological characteristics are very different in your pictures. From number of leaflets, the blooming plant versus non blooming seedling, and the elongated leaf lance shaped leaflets to the shorter rounded leaflets. I myself would guess that tetraploiding alone would not change these that greatly. I think it would change the size and thickness of the plant parts. I would guess that either this batch of seed are from two different seed parents or that the pollen parents are very different from one another. Or maybe it is a combination of both. But usually crosses involving species are so dominated by the species trait. I am a little stumped myself.
How different is the toothing around the margins of the leaf? How different or similar is were the leaf joins the stem? When the other one flowers I wonder if the female parts are way different?
The lineage of Basye’s Bracteata would definitely explain the wide variation in the seedlings. After looking at it there is a lot of different things in that lineage.