Does anyone have any information on this one regarding diseases resistance and fertility? I like the purple color and the leaves are described as “gray-green” on the Edmunds website. If this is a good one I’m thinking it might be good to add to one of my breeding goals using ‘Ruglauca’, ‘Skinner’s Red Leaf Perpetual’, and Midnight Blue for purple flower and grey/purple-ish leaves.
It will be new to the US for 2011. I personally love Heart n’ Soul. It is the healthier answer to Double Delight, Cherry Parfait, etc. to my parts of the US. Rapsody in Blue – everyone knows its virtues and pitfalls.
From the pics, the first thing that I notice is that the reverse is paler than the face and the reverse has a thin purple picotee. I am unsure how this would play out in breeding but it seems different that most purples in that regard. The flower form looks like it took notes from Summer Wine.
Good luck with it! It cant be worse than the slow, vigorless and boring Night Owl.
Thanks for the imput Jadae. I can see Iceberg in Heart n’ Soul. HnS is an attractive blossom.
I didn’t notice the purple picotee in the pictures but thanks for pointing that out. That could be an interesting trait. I’ve been disappointed by most of the recent purples that have been recently released but love Midnight Blue. It would be nice if this one could help me move closer to my goals than some of the other mauve/purples of late. This is the only picture I could find and I like what I see so I’ll probably give this one a shot too. So, maybe Stormy Weather crossed with Midnight Blue next season.
Maybe outcross to orange, scarlet or mixed reds? Even Sympathie from the other thread could be useful. It has peonin, pelargonidin and cyanins in likely somewhat equal values. Its lineage is from the New Dawn line, the damask red lines (cyanins galore!), the early pelargonidin floribunda types and kordesii. That is but one example of a way to think about what could possibly mix well with the purples. It is hard to predict though because its difficult to know what will be dominantly expressed from cultivar to cultivar. The one thing Stomry Weather points out is that Rhapsody in Blue can pass on purple with a non-orange. However, Heart n Soul’s ancestory is loaded with reds that age purple.
This all brings up a valid point, which is “What are everyone’s goals for purple?” I ask this because it seems extremelye asy to recreate the wheel simply because the color is “new” or highly loved (interesting that both men and women love dark purple in roses). It also begs the question of, “What else can purple do?” What new patterns can be found? What new shades could be had? The picotee on the reverse of Stormy Weather is much like Playboy. The stripes on Purple Splash are equally interesting. I know some have explored these questions just as much as others hae been frustrated with a color that seems fickle. Then again, there was a time when true red that didnt blue was once a goal that breeders found exceedingly difficult to achieve.
Btw, Heart n’ Soul has the same picotee on the reverse. I know because I cataloged every rose in my garden that year that did. Only 3 roses were listed: Playboy, Cherry Meidiland and Heart n Soul. All 3 had that strange reverse picotee that looks like it was sewn into the back of the petals. Its only in hybrids like Betty Boop where it is strongly expressed, especially on both sides in that case. However, even when the secondary color fades (ie. yellow in Playboy), the picotee will remain.
Anyways, food for thought.
The picotee is interesting on those you mentioned. I’d like to see what a very defined narrow picotee would look like on a rose…much like on some daylilies I’ve seen/grown. A shade of mauve with a dark purple picotee would be neat.
My goal for purple is the darkest shade I can achieve stitting on glauca leaves and stems. I’ve had this vision for a long time of purple framed by grey/purple-ish leaves. The right leaf color is going to be the hard part I’m sure.
I also came up with a list of potential deep reds for future parents that I’ll post for suggestions. A deep red with purple picotee exhibited much like the red on Playboy would also interest me. I keep thinking of other ‘wants’ but am trying to stay focused on a limited list of goals and not get too scattered.
Do you have any goals with purple at all Jadae?
Not really. I have a very loose goal of creating a species hybrid (ie at least 1/4 species)that is on the smaller side with fully double blooms. For example, a Rosa virginia hybrid. But its not a true goal.
My main goal is to create a true mauve hybrid in a true shrub. ie. the color of Lagerfeld or Neptune, etc. Hansa Park is close but not what I have in mind. I want to do the same in a climber. There are some out there in rare places but they miss the mark.
To be honest, the only reason I worked with purples is either for the mauve or because they look nice in the garden.
Neptune sure is a beautiful mauve. Is fragrance a given with mauves?
Probably not a given, but it does appear to be more likely, at least from what’s been introduced. Madame Violet and Lady X were the ones I remember not having any detectable fragrance, but all of the others I’ve grown (except for an unregistered, ugly mauve floribunda in the 80s named Blue Boy) have been at least “fragrant”, if not intensely so. St. Exupery wasn’t terribly fragrant, but it did have SOME scent.
There is one out now by Star Roses called Silver Star that is fairly scentless. It is confusing because Kordes has a fragrant one from the 1970s with the same name that brought us Shocking Blue.
I knew of that one, Jadae, but haven’t grown it as I had the Kordes Silver Star from V. Kraus in Canada from the early 80s until a few years ago. One of the best of that shade in the mid desert was Charles DeGaulle. The whole plant was happy in that heat and wind. And, it had foliage which wasn’t subject to frying like all of the Armstrong mauves out of Ivory Tower, Blue Nile and Angel Farce.
Why anyone wold use Ivory Tower for anything was a mystery to me. I can only assume it was used because it melded well with mauve since its a white produced for yellows and oranges. It is one ugly rose here. Arf. I can understand Angel Face despite its major flaws because of the lack of options.
I grew Blue Ribbon for a few years. I received a trophy for the only thing it was good for in exhibition – rose in a bowl 
It has “perfect” form here…and no plant whatsoever, haha. If there was foliage to notice, then maybe it would fry here. Lagerfeld, on the other hand, is a beast here. It is HUGE. But the blooms are so extremely heat sensitive, and it transmits dominantly. I had some beautiful orchid blended blooms out of High Hopes x Lagerfeld, which cringed at the mention of heat =( I was a sad panda the day I had to toss it. It as so pretty, lol.
Blue Ribbon had a great scent, but as a garden rose, it was as unproductive as Blue Nile. Lagerfeld WAS a horse! It shot out of the bud union with canes in every direction and bloomed like rag weed! It smelled great and had very nice form, even in the high heat. It was completely clean most of the time, but it gets WINDY around these parts and a six foot cane breaking into a dozen, foot long wispy stems with one large, double flower at the end of each one is “ground cover fodder”! As long as I staked the clusters or wove them into surrounding plants, it provided masses of cuttable, fragrant, silvery flowers. So many of the Armstrong mauves of the early 80s had Ivory Tower genes in them, and all had foliage which fried in the sun, without any chemical assistance. Great names, wonderful scents, full of promise and every one of them as fulfilled as campaign boasts!
“The Quest for the Blue Rose” was an early obsession in my rose path. By the early nineties, there wasn’t a mauve available here or in Canada which hadn’t passed through that canyon. I actually took a bucket of over fifty different mauve, lavender, purple roses to work and had people walking by exclaiming, “Look at the Sterling Silvers!” Funny thing was, I didn’t even GROW SS at the time because all of these were actually improvements on it. I regularly poured over cans of Sterling Silver whenever I found them, searching for a plant which impressed me as resembling what it was supposed to look like. The closest was the florist Sterling Silver I propagated and Vintage sold and may still have.
Does anyone remember the atrocious Mystic Mauve and Vol de Nuit? Neither would open here. The petals were so papery thin, hot weather or even a threat of dew, fog or humidity turned them into virtual Camellia flowers! Botrytis filled, slimy globs of yuck.
I still have Vol De Nuit. You’re right though about the moisture thing. It rained yesterday and I just tossed a couple of unopened buds from it into the canyon on grounds of botrytis; they would never have opened.
It can be pretty though, and I find the color haunting – this pic is from last May.
What a great picture and the color is awesome…beautiful.
Crepe de Chine and Vol de Nuit were lauded 25 years ago for being so fragrant and retaining their fragrance once dry that they were perfect for making potpourri. Interesting Crepe de Chine is listed as light to no fragrance on HMF.
If anyone still grows Gandy’s Purple Beauty, cut a bud and open it under old department store type fluorescent tube lights. It will look denim blue!
Speaking of which, a friend and I played a prank at the Santa Barbara Rose Show several years ago. She told me to bring every white rose I could find. She had tubes of blue dye waiting. Iceberg turned palest blue with a sea sick green center and darker blue picotee. Snowbird turned pale green in the center with blue spots on the white petals. Both made me rather ill looking at them driving up the 101 to Ventura from Thousand Oaks! She palmed a few vases while I sneaked them in under my jacket. The Iceberg was tagged, “Blue Ice” and in honor of a mutual friend who was in attendance and who raises Dalmatians, Snowbird was “Dali’s Dalmatian”, though “Smurf Queen” was a close second. Fortunately, the judging was complete and the person who found them was our mutual friend, who had a “newbie” in tow. The newbie asked if they were real and our friend stated loudly, “NO! But they’re d@#)med good fakes!” LOL!
pale blue with a sea sick green center…sounds wonderful. lol
lol, Kim. I’m going to steal that idea one of these days. Sometimes these things need a dash of humor. Think I’ll use navy blue dye, or maybe black . . .
lol, do it in designer colors like mint and deep chocolate, haha.
Ive been trying Violet Mist with zero success. Like 25 hips failed with it as a mother. Its pollen failed on what it was used on. Violet Mist is like a miniflora version of Lagerfeld sans scent and thin petals. Its a pretty good garden plant here.
Sweetness is another new Lagerfeld invention. The substance, color and scent are great. The health is average for an HT/GR, which is an improvement for most mauves. The architecture is a bit wispy until the whole plant is mature. The vigor is also weak until the plant is mature. Its slow to take off but otherwise good relative to most mauves.
Fragrant Plum is my favorite to date but I dont think its a rose for the south. It hates heat. It is otherwise good for cool, temperate climates.
All in all, mauves have a long way to go to be equivelent to other color tones.
Jadae,
I’m a huge fan of ‘Fragrant Plum’ as well. I had to leave it behind in a move and kind of forgot about that one. FP may be a good one for me to order for spring delivery. It could be a great one to use in the mix for mauve/purple flower on blue/grey leaves that I’m hoping to achieve. I had a very nice seedling (see link) from a Counrty Dancer x Fragrant Plum cross and think that FP has a lot to offer. If I remember correctly, disease resistance was good.