I’m new to the rose hybridizing community and excited to learn from all of you! I’ve been fascinated by roses for years and recently decided to try my hand at hybridizing my own varieties.
A few things I’m curious about:
Parent Selection – How do you choose which roses to cross for desirable traits like color, fragrance, and disease resistance?
Pollination Tips – Any advice on timing and technique to improve successful hybridization rates?
Seedling Care – How do you best nurture seedlings to ensure they grow strong and healthy?
Common Mistakes – What are some pitfalls beginners often encounter and how to avoid them?
I’d love to hear about your experiences, success stories, or any creative tips that could help a beginner get started. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom!
Looking forward to learning from this amazing community!
Welcome! You will find folks here are generally quite generous with help, information, opinions, etc.
Most of us breed for the joy of discovery, experimentation, and exploration. The odds of an amateur breeding creating a rose worthy of bringing to market are relatively slim – commercial breeding houses might have the luxury of playing numbers games we can only imagine when seeking to get a new, market-worthy seedling.
How long have you been lurking, and how deep have you waded in thus far?
What are you goals?
Where are you located (i.e. what climate requirements. I hesitate to recommend breeding stock without knowing the above.)
I certainly don’t want put you off, but if you haven’t yet done so, you might go to the old site, rosebreeders.org to read up on some introductory info. This current forum also permits searches on topics.
If you aren’t familiar with it, a major resource for plants to breed with would be helpmefind.com. It is not a commercial site and is funded through memberships, but is the ultimate database for roses, and with a very reasonable annual membership fee, it permits deep dives into pedigrees and family trees of cultivars.
In addition to attestations of fellow breeders here, helpmefind is probably the primary source for research and inspiration for many of us.
Looking forward to learning a little more about you and your garden so we might better answer your questions!
1 - I always have a goal set in the beginning but when the first flowers arrive I just pollinated on the spot whats available. I mostly try to get the beautifull color on healthy roses. Hultemia on seedlings from last year. I have a few hulthemia seedlings not that great and try to improve that.
2 - I remove petals late in the afternoon and try to pollinate in the morning. I cover them up with aluminium kitchen stuff. Sometimes I pollinated twice but not this year.
3 - I have some big LED lights for januari/februari/march and just let nature do its thing. If they do well they do well, of not, they go.
4- I sometimes forgot seeds when they soaked in peroxide all day…or soil getting to dry. My biggest error is with labeling. Almost every year a few mislabeled/tagless seedlings doing very well. I try to finetune this year but it took a while.
I have now everything digitalized in sectors, labeling everything twice. Seeds in the fridge now are double packed with the code and preparations for sprouting months is better now. Just try and learn from errors. Just make a first goal what you want to achieve. Maybe its health, maybe it is color or shaped flowers. I am back to some brownish and hulthemia. I also going to pollinate some of the previous seedlings just to see if they are fertile or not. Some are ugly but sets hips so still interesting what they do in the future.
I would place as a first priority figuring out what exactly you wish to accomplish: this can be anything from getting a rose you can enjoy growing that you bred yourself, to specific traits you would desire. Having your goal set clearly in your mind will help in the selection process, both of parents and offspring.
Second I would say researching to find agreeable seed parents that will help you reach your goal. This can cut out a lot of time and energy waisted, as well as a cut a lot of frustration. A plant that will readily set seed with the types of crosses you want, and then germinate at a decent rate, will be an immense help! You can search here on the forum about seed parents and read a lot of information gathered by other’s experience.
Third, practice germinating seeds, even if you need to grab some open pollinated hips to work with at first. Getting practice at storing seeds and dealing with germinations will set you on a good footing for when you begin working with those hard earned seeds. Also, you can practice with the advice you read on working with raising young seedlings.
Fourth, record everything: if you have a goal you wish to work towards over time this will be hugely helpful. If you only wish to get a first generation seedling this can still be helpful, as figuring successful seed parents for future seasons.
Lastly, and this probably should have been first, have fun! If you can enjoy your time spent working with your roses, then it is already a win.
I have posted a few short videos on my Instagram and Youtube (DuanesRoses) if you want to see a little of my own process. I still use a lot of older practices, that seem to work for me. It is always interesting to read here what others have been experimenting with and what has proven helpful!
Interesting. I would have suggested getting into germinating seed first and would have observed that for me, real goals didn’t gel until after a year or two playing in the pollen. (Truthfully goals are still pretty fluid for me. The availability of pollen in my hand as I wander the garden frequently inspires me to depart from a plan. Is it just me?)
Same here. I have goals but the first day of pollinating they go. I get the pollen I can get and put it whatever I can find. I also put pollen on seedlings from last year to see whats happens. I have a few roses I know the hips will be great. The Simple Life and Westerland are seedbombs.
And here. I do have planned pollinations, but that never stops me from wondering “what if…” as I wander about, and (usually) waste my time. I’m sure I’d have more success if I’d just stick to the script, but what fun is that?
…which is not at all to suggest Duane’s approach isn’t (perhaps significantly) more productive. I suspect the major breeding houses are all very deliberate in their processes. (Amateurs probably have more fun though, dontcha think? )
Would love to interview some of the pros to compare their techniques generally. Did the newsletter do that periodically once upon a time? Or are houses pretty guarded about their processes?
There are some videos on youtube. I saw an Harkness interview and it was interesting to hear how they work. Austin and other breeders have a lot of content too. They are a lot more brutal in selection. Harkness discard roses with the smallest desease signings. Also beautifull roses will go visit the bin. I am a sucker with discarting roses…i want to keep everything.
Mostly the same here. Really depends on what pollen I have and what’s available to set hips. The weather being pretty random also plays a part.
There’s some pretty solid goals that I stick to (and often have multiple parent plants of, like Crested Moss…I get seed from it and a few germinations each year but often pretty weak seedlings…more parent plants more seedlings is the plan and hopefully something decent useful comes out of it) but most are more general (like mini x hulthemia or thornless x hulthemia or bright saturated colour modern crossed to hybrid musk or hulthemia pollen on sweet briars….where neither parent really matters to the goal, just that one parent has X set of traits and the other has Y set…just about getting seedlings with all the traits or crossing the seedlings with each other to try and recover things).
re: Harkness discarding for smallest disease….it mostly pays off, at least here his stuff is often the most healthy, tends to compete with Kordes. The other big player’s stuff tends to get infected here, likely strains of blackspot that aren’t in the area of other breeders or something.
)