Stanwell Perpetual

Technique Flower Initiation
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Stanwell Perpetual has never been adequately explained. Its mother was supposedly a wild spinosissima and its father is believed to be Quatre Saisons , mainly because it must have remontency somewhere in its ancestry and Quatre Saisons was the only remontant rose around. The problem is that Stanwell Perpetual is not only remontant, it is a true perpetual (at least in my garden). Since this trait is recessive it had to have the perpetual gene in both parents i.e. both the wild spinosissima and Quatre Saisons had to be carrying the gene and there is no evidence either parent has this in its DNA.

At least 9 of the once blooming pimpinellifoliae that I currently have in my garden rebloom at least once. One of my three Golden Chersonese was in bloom between June and September 2010. I believe that the pimpinellifoliae in general and the spinosissimas in particular have remontency and perhaps even perpetual blooming in their genes, I also suspect that the spinosissimas have yellow in their genes. It’s unfortunate that these traits were not followed up and rosedom turned almost its complete attention to the China roses in the early 19th century.

Stanwell Perpetual seldom sets fertile seeds but when it does the seeds should be gathered and grown. A race of true Perpetual Spinosissimas could be the result. At least one other Perpetual Spinosissima has come from sowing SP’s seeds - Paula Vapelle, it is smaller but in my garden normally has more flowers than SP. Its color is white with yellow shadings (other sources say the shadings are green but they appear yellow to me). I do not know whether Paula Vapelle’s seed and pollen is fertile. Mine did not set seed last year.

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There seems to be an assumption that one gene is responsible for blooming. This lacks holism. There may be more than one single thing at play, some of which we may still not be aware of.

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Jadae I would agree with you there, I crossed Alba Maxima with Sympathie and got a repeat bloomer and a good darn one at that. Of all the seeds I had sown the rate was only 1% , but hey thats all you need, What gets me though is , when crossing with OGR , most are prone to mildews and black spot, Alba’s dont seemed to be fazed by anything.

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Flowering is a complicated process that is beginning to be understood in some model organisms. But that’s sure no bed of roses. My take on it is that there are a couple major processes at work

First, determinate cane/shoot growth, like in New Dawn vs Dr. van Fleet. There, the number of leaves formed before a flower initiates is rather variable.

Second, need for vernalization, or winter chilling. In the brassicas both daylength and cold are needed for typical “biennial” types such as cabbage. That’s the only way to get ahead for them. For the little weed Arabidopsis, some varieties need winter, others don’t. They overlay that with a day length response sometimes so that they will flower directly from spring sowing, like arugula or cress, but make a rosette from later season sowing which requires cold before it can initiate flowers.

Roses that bloom on last year’s wood typically have a fixed number of leaves that come with the flower. Usually it is a number below 10. I believe it was Serge Gudin who described greenhouse grown florist roses as having 7 leaves per stalk with variable internode length, obviously a selected trait.

In our local R arkansana some shoots come from the “root” and produce a panicle of flowers about the same time as the blooms from old wood. If you pick off all the hips and the weather is favorable, there will be a second flush of bloom from axillary buds down the cane. This may be part of the same flowering response, whereby the hormone that signals successful [pollination has to compete with florigen which would keep the flowering going. Same seems true of a rose I have from back east (maybe swamp rose). My strain of R arkansana was in full bloom in October when I got it, it having been mowed down along a rural road through the summer.

I’d say the first thing to do is to determine what kind of “reblooming” you have. Is it new shoots from new wood, or is it emergence from last year’s formed buds that are just delayed? I’ve seen that on Harison’s Yellow after cutting branches for floral displays. The cut off branch blooms several weeks later than the majority. But it doesnt’ bloom from axillary buds that formed in this season. Redbud trees do the same trick when a late freeze gets their partially opened buds. A small fraction held in reserve are forced into bloom a couple weeks later.

I know next to nothing about the spins. In their native habitat do they have to overcome specific adversities that would promote a reblooming adaptation? Things like drought and frost or grasshopper plagues come to mind.

Could the coastal WA climate simulate winter for them in summer? Kim Rupert mentioned that Silver Moon reblooms fairly reliably ins some Cal climate, but I’ve never seen a hint of a sign of it here. Maybe because my bush never gets very mature, freezing back every 2-3 years. Or maybe there’s a different clone out there. Also doesnt’ have the same summer weather.

Is the reblooming perhaps selectable as a clonal mutation? I once had Dr van Fleet rebloom (one small shoot), but the cutting I rooted did not. Someone else was lucky and got New Dawn. Perhaps Stanwell did that. We don’t know if the original seedling was freely reblooming.

Just some rambling thoughts.

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The Albas are derived from Rosa canina, which is kind of like the synstylae counterpart of the whole Caninae tribe. Funny thing is, Rosa rubiginosa has had high marks for blackspot resistance in various abstracts, but it will mildew like mad in certain climates, lol. Its higher in anthocyanins than canina is. Even seemingly highly similar species from the same family can have extremely diverse and complex genetic patterns. Predicting what does what is kind of like waiting for a shooting star.

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Howdy Jadae,

You are not wrong about Canina’s complex genetic patterns, when I cross species roses with moderns , the use of Hurst’s septet formulae is quite valuable. Looking at Caninae family , be they tetraploid , pentaploid or hexaploid , the common pattern that they have is , only one septet is in the pollen , all others are located in the ovaries. A good exercise to do would be doing the same cross visa a versa on an Alba to see what would crop up.

You would have to do multiple crosses when using Alba Maxima as a seed parent as it only puts one seed per hip.

cheers warren

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Stanwell Perpetual in my old desert garden was truly perpetual. It NEVER slowed down. The year my youngest sister got married, I not only got to give her away, but provide the rose petals for the wedding. That April was terribly cold and wet. Out of twelve hundred roses, only Stanwell Perpetual had enough flowers to fill a large Tupperware container with petals. Of course, it was perfect. I was given this plant some years before and brought it home. The day I planted it in the ground, a danged rabbit ate it to beneath the horse manure mulch. I believed it was gone, until one flower appeared resting right on the horse apples. The top of the stem, just below the soil surface, shot out a flower and it never stopped until the garden went away. Suzanna flowered as religiously as Stanwell.

Weather triggers odd “repeat” performances. Banksia doesn’t “repeat”, however double yellow out front, capping a huge stand of Golden Bamboo, not only flowers weeks earlier than any of the other many plants on this hill, but gives repeat flushes throughout the year. There is nothing special about this particular plant. It stresses for water in summer and has enough water transpired around it to keep it mildewed much of the year. Many reports of “repeat blooming Banksias” have come for years and all of them have been from more coastal areas where the plant “thinks” it’s spring because those temperatures remain for months at a time. In the same nursery and in gardens I dealt with in the area, plain old Banksias flowered for months, yet it never got hot enough to make Purezza flower more than a few weeks. In the mid desert, Purezza flowered spring through late fall, until frosts stopped it.

O’Neal blueberry “repeats” in Pacific Palisades regularly. I had a client who lived up Chautauquah Blvd. there whose four year old daughter ate fresh blueberries from her plants up to ten months a year.

Right on the beach there, Nigel Hawthorne and R. Arkansana “Peppermint” flowered for five months. Both were budded on multiflora, canned in five gallon nursery cans from Ashdown. There was nothing special about either plant as they both came from my plants forty miles north, which only flowered a few weeks (in GOOD years) due to the more extreme differences in the seasons. Fuji apples flowered twice a year two blocks from the beach. Near Disney Studios in Burbank, which has a heavy coastal influence because of passes through the hills, I know of a Gordon apple growing over a lady’s front porch which flowers and fruits repeatedly each year and has since she bought the house about 1960.

Silvermoon, once mature and established well, did provide repeat flowering more often than not. Usually, it was in years which didn’t have the “Bellows of Hades” heat periods for extended periods of time. That kind of intense heat usually stopped most things from flowering.

Then, you have the ones you can trick into “repeating”. Schoener’s Nutkana, if allowed to set hips, then stripped, fertilized and watered well, repeated regularly in Santa Clarita. Kim

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If I had a nickle for every seedling that matured as a repeat bloomer, completely contradicting its pedigree…

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Yesterday I harvested 12 OP hips from a big bush of Stanwell Perpetual. I´ve got one seed from each hip and could extract 10 embryos that looked pretty good to me. I hope the germinate! Has anybody an idea what I might expect from these? Seems nothing is known besides Paula Vapelle.

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You may not have a lot of company, Wernersen. Non-chinensis rebloom has been unfashionable forever, and Stanwell is usually very poor at making hips. I didn’t even know how many seeds per hip to expect from it, never having seen any.

I’m in a similar position with seedlings of Autumn Damask. HMF says that the last release of a rose that had Autumn Damask as its seed parent was d’Esquermes in 1835. Like Stanwell, it offers only non-chinensis rebloom, and typically 0-1 seed per hip, so it’s far more popular with gardeners than with breeders. All I can tell you at this point is that, despite less than 1 seed per pollination, its seeds have an okay germination rate, and don’t require long stratification. Aside from the half of them which I murdered with a bad batch of potting medium, they seem healthy and robust. Unless some of the Portland pollen I put on them took, I’ll be surprised if any rebloom, but some of their offspring might. That probably holds true for yours, too.

I hope you will fill us in later, with news of your growing seedlings!

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I can’t help you there. I’ve had SP for years and I’ve never seen a hip on it. So it’ll be interesting to see if the embryos grow and what they’ll look like.

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My Stanwell Perpetual produced hips this year. Maybe because of our long drought in California? I collected 3 hips. Two had 1 seed and the other had 2. I planted them outside last month in small pots along with seeds from other roses. No germination of the Stanwell Perpetual seeds yet, but I have my first seedlings of R. glabrifolia (1), President Dutailly (2), and R. fedtschenkoana (1).

Stanwell Perpetual is blooming right now. Only a few flowers but still nice to see. There may be more hips forming from the most recent flowers. I’ll have to watch, because garden critters find these hips delectable. One of the 3 I harvested earlier this year was partially eaten by the time I got to it.

Melissa

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I don’t know what the DNA guys have to say about the ancestry of SP, but I thought this item might be of interest.

The Rose Garden (1872)
Thomas Rivers
According to the statements of M. Boitard, there is scarcely any limit to the variation of Roses produced from seed. He affirms that M. Noisette, a French cultivator, has never sown seeds of the Chinese Roses (R. Indica) without raising some Scotch Roses (R. Spinosissima) from them. He states, This fact is not supported by a solitary occurrence, but has been frequently observed by that cultivator, and is further attested by the evidence of M. Laffay, who has raised seedlings on an extensive scale, often as many as 200,000 in a single year.

If SP turned up as a chance seedling, it seems a bit more likely that the Spinosissima was the pollen parent.

Rebloom has turned up among the Scotch roses a couple of other times. ‘Doorenbos Selection’ is of unrecorded ancestry. ‘Ormiston Roy’, on the other hand, was raised by Doorenbos in the F2 generation from a cross of ‘Allard’ x an unspecified Scotch rose. It reblooms a little (so I’ve read).

‘Allard’ is presumably the OP seedling of ‘Harison’s Yellow’ raised by Prof. Allard.

And it is not too off-topic to mention that ‘Soleil d’Or’ was a seedling of ‘Antoine Ducher’ x 'Persian Yellow. Strange to say, both ‘Le Reve’ and ‘Lawrence Johnston’ [Souv de Madame Eugène Verdier (HT) x ‘Persian Yellow’] are once-bloomers.

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There are a few other spinosissimas with a little rebloom, even one (Haspina Rosella) as straightforward as spinosissima x self. Paula Vapelle also points to spinosissima rebloom-friendly tendencies of some sort, but I haven’t heard that they bloom into winter, like my Stanwell’s doing.

Here’s a thought… does anyone know if Riverbanks x Stanwell is following in its parents footsteps as a perpetual bloomer?

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Do you know if ‘Paula Vapelle’ is any more fertile than ‘Stanwell Perpetual’?

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No. As far as I know, the only example ever imported to the Americas lives in a private collection in Washington state, and I don’t know how to contact the owner. I’d be surprised if nobody in Europe is working with it, but don’t read European rose fora very regularly.

Do you think that knowing about its fertility would help resolve questions about SP?

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If the Washington State collection is Botanicum Scoticum, that’s Len Heller who has posted here previously. He’s on Face Book as well as Help Me Find. The former under his name and the latter under the garden name. He can be easily contacted through either site.

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“Sorry, this HelpMeFind member chooses not accept private messages.”

I’m not on Facebook, but hope that somebody manages to get some, it makes me nervous when a desirable rose is one plant away from unobtainability.

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Go to the page for Rosarium Scoticum, his garden, where you are able to send private messages. I just did. Rosarium Scoticum

Look on his membership page on HMF. Member Profile Where it shows his email address.

lerosier3@yahoo.com

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Maybe not. It seems pretty clear that a Spinosissima was involved, so back-crossing to that species would be expected to improve fertility.

The important point, though, is that if SP can make offspring with Spinosissima pollen, ‘Doorenbos Selection’ should be tried. A darker version of SP would be welcomed by people who already like SP.