Living Easy and Rhapsody In Blue grew from almost nothing last year to 3ft and 5ft. and is for now the go to standard to shoot for here. The almost nothing is the little green thing at the bottom of the first photo.
Yowser! They certainly have done well there!
The red rose next to Livin Easy is a second year seedling. In this photo is a seedling ignored, not taged or propagated and one taged for the color. Even two years is not enough time for some to get the strength to show their potential. The sick looking one gets one more chance with cuttings since similar plants have shown much improvement from cuttings which makes no sense at all. Neil
They both seem to have great color and a good petal count. Interesting that the cuttings would do better than the mother plant though.
In this set are typical seed trays and germination. These are from spring sowing with additional fall germination of over 200 now growing. Not the best time for me because by the next spring their timing is off and they do not grow good. Some of the divisions have small numbers of seeds and in three years trying have never germinated anything but now all of a sudden produce a thousand seeds on a decade old bush. Some roses I think take way longer than three months to form a proper hip and will turn color given enough time.
The bottom two are trays of the same seeds but one had way more rotted hip seeds(blackened), and less than half the germination. This year when some of the hips start to rot they are picked, opened, and the seeds dried.
Between the tricks of the roses and the tricks of the trade it keeps one going.
Several points on the sister seedlings. The better and bigger just sometimes flowers as shown, the bud after had a rather poor flower and even though the bush gets a fair amount of desease it holds the leaves. I’ve pulled dozens of two year old seedlings just lately because they couldn’t keep their leaves. I also read on this forum of others noting how cuttings sometimes give a better plant.