See:
What a great article recognizing his contributions. I have rooted cuttings of his ‘Red Dawn’ x ‘Suzanne’ to share if people are interested. Please PM me.
Txs for posting Henry.
I have been hard pressed to find first person, bio details on his life and technical work. I am told his double petunia income facilitated getting a greenhouse operation going for advancing his work.
Red Dawn x Suzanne is one rose l take cuttings consistently over the years to increase garden stock - one of very few totally cane hardy repeating roses that blooms to freeze up in my garden.
Not succeeded in getting crosses as of yet … but to prevent discouraging others thats not saying much … Sved did it … l figure it is just a lack of crossing seed numbers and maybe a wee bit lacking in skill at this stage.
Have to hunt for the one rose of his in the article missing in the garden.
Hi Riku,
Red Dawn x Suzanne is triploid and that may be behind the challenge in getting crosses. I used root tips of the cuttings I rooted last fall to count it. It doesn’t set too many op hips for me. I should have focused on using it more than I have over the years and should focus on trying it as a male next season.
Hi David,
Thanks for the ploidy information and suggestion as to try using it as a pollen parent. That will be tried as l am really only going to get 50% of the chromos of any cross (a long time since went through Bio 101 at Queens and then Eng called).
I do get small hips and the few seeds do sink, when l focused on it being the seed parent. But no germination so far. I crossed it with a non-hardy fully double fragrant GJ - because read somewhere it either had briar or AppleJack in it - but who knows except canes make me believe something along those lines is believeable.
Always interesting to me that none of the non rugosa derivatives in Ag program original products seem to mirror its level of cane hardiness in my garden. Second guessing is always pedantic, but wonder if they had crossed some more spino in whether cane survival would of improved.
The rose is disease free in the garden. Except for late seasom PM … but l seem to be in a low pressure biohazzrd area except for BC forest fire smoke over the last 10 years.
He was a native to the city where I was born. We have several rose gardens unfortunately there is no plaque or something to commemorate his work. At least not that I know. Bugnet got a Honorary PhD.