Just a question for some of you seasoned hybridizers. If you were going to attempt to breed rugosas with a little more substance to their petals, how would you proceed?
CM
The simple way would be to breed your favoured rugosas with the Pavement series (or other hybrid rugosas) which already have better substance i.e. Foxi & Showy, bearing in mind that Showy has little if any scent, & Foxi while wonderfully scented with a spicey non rugosa scent, produces few hips & fewer seeds when left to its own devices. Otherwise use healthy floribundas & be prepared to discard many seedlings with poor health, fertility issues, or other undesirable traits, then breed the best back to your rugosas of choice to regain desirable rugosa characteristics. In the first generation many of the hybrid seedlings tend to lose the typical rugosa characteristics, of health & hardiness of the rugosa mother.
I don’t grow the two hybrid rugosas mentioned, but I’ve seen them in plantings in parking lots & they are lovely, but are obvious hybrids. They’re not just rugosas with better substance. If you do go this route you might just obtain pretty shrub roses which might not be identifiable as rugosas, but be beautiful roses in their own right.
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I suppose not all of the Pavement series rugosas are created equal but the one I have "Purple Pavement’ is a real dog and most likely it will be shovel pruned next season.
I purchased it because of the Pavement series reputation and my other rugosas do very well here in Zone 5A but not this variety however.
It was a sparse bloomer to begin with and preferred to sucker aggressively rather than bloom. I had no flowers on the plant at all this year and it has been in this prime location for 4 years now.
I wonder if the Showy Pavement that Lydia is talking about is the same one I grow? I find that mine is wonderfully fragrant and it
Ya know… some of the more unusual hybrids arent that bad for species types. I know Therese Bugnet is as about as boring as it gets, the they hold up fairly nicely rain or shine. Topaz Jewel, despite its nasty plant habit, also holds up fairly well. Both Ann Endt and Basye’s Purple do well too.
Rosa rugosa alba did well as a seed parent with tetraploids – for me. I basically stripped the bloom of sepals, petals and anthers before they even popped open. It was all about timing the blooms right exactly when the first petal had a true white tone spying through the sepals. I got massive amounts of takes that way. Unfortunately I didnt have enough time/room for a bajillion delayed-blooming, crazy-thorned demons because of the move so I never got to see them bloom. They were crazy crosses – Baby Love, Livin Easy, Tatton, Kanegem…lol. They all looked like smaller plants of Robusta – dwarf, blood-sucking demons with super shiny foliage, lol. So…anyways… Rosa rugosa alba worked as a seed parent quite well. I actually switched from pollen to seed with it because the germination rate on rugosa species is insane. Maybe its cause Oregon is like Japan? Who knows…
I’ll have to give the parking lot rugosas a better sniff when they start blooming again. I did manage to get lots of seeds from the whole lot of them, except for Foxi. The entire planting produced 2 really large seeds & one small one. But the blooms were really gorgeous.
As for Therese Bugnet, it seems to accept pollen from triploids. I put pollen of John Davis on it & got seeds. Now to see how well they germinate.
