I’ve always loved this rose from a far, and I’m deciding to drop ‘Secret Garden Musk’ for this rose. It all depends. How big will this get? And how well does it set seeds? I want something in the size of climbing Sombreiul. You know… Something not to big for a large front gate. I don’t want it if it is invasive and crowd my other roses nearby.
Hi Enrique, laevigata gets big. (15-20’?) in a warm climate. It sets OP hips easily. It’s quite thorny and prone to engulfing small trees. It flowers best when established and unpruned. If you follow it’s hybrids you will see that there was a hybrid tea released by Aicardi in the third generation but that was a dead end. This is another one that needs chromosome doubling to be useful. It’s current hybrids seem to be highly sterile triploids. You should be able to produce hybrids with any other diploid though, and that sometimes makes the chromosomes unstable enough to start incoporating other hybrids or tetraploid species. Most offspring will be triploid and sterile, but there is a small chance of fertile tetraploid offspring. Once the instability of the chromosomes is established, there is a much greater chance of success. Thanks, Robert
That was my original idea: get an just fertile enough offspring, and hope that nature will be kind to me and get a self fertilized rose with unreduced male and female gamete. OR I may just use some surflan-- I’m starting to get good at it now and have 3 roses that maybe tetraploids. I have several diploid roses in my garden such as R. foliolosa, R. blanda, R. rugosa hybrids, and ‘The Fairy’. And depending where I will be within a few years, hopefully I can get to work with ‘R. bracteata’. It all depends. But right now I just want laevigata for the mean while.