Two years ago I stumbled upon a carolina rose with two blooms, both of which had six petals. I figured it was just a random anomaly, but I finally got a chance to revisit it today and sure enough there was another six-petalled flower. Sadly, my timing was off and I missed all but the very last bloom, so I didn’t manage to collect much pollen. The wild roses bloomed a solid 4-6 weeks earlier than they did last year.
I’m only going to cross it with other species roses to see if the trait is heritable. But since it’ll be a minimum of two years for me to find out personally I wanted to ask if anyone here has encountered or read of anything similar? I’ve looked at hundreds of pictures of r. carolina over the years and while the species demonstrates a wide variability in bloom shape, size, and color, I haven’t ever seen any other six-petalled specimens.
I have often found species roses with one or more extra petals. In fact, just today I saw a Nootka rose with eight petals! I remember finding a “Prairie rose” (possibly acicularis, I grew up in the northeastern-part of BC) specimen with ten to twelve petals on each flower when I was a kid.
They aren’t that uncommon as a random-flower on an otherwise typical plant, but an entire plant that flowers with multiple extra petals might be worth cultivating and test-breeding.
Yeah that’s why I didn’t think much of it at the time. It wasn’t until two years later seeing another a six-petalled flower on an entirely different runner that I started to wonder if the plant might be somewhat special.
We don’t get any occasional fall rebloom here, so I won’t know much until I can revisit the rose next year, and hopefully the year after that I’ll be getting some blooms from the foliolosa x carolina cross I made yesterday.
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