Actually, ‘Lilac Charm’ is a pretty decent plant up here as well. It isn’t completely disease free, but it is far better than most of its class.
Some mildew here when you’d expect it. I’ve loved LC for twenty-five years. Roses of Yesterday and Today used to state in their catalog how glorious it is with Golden Fleece. Annie Laurie McDowell grew beds of them together at The Homestead Acre and they were gorgeous together! It charms me the same way Irish Elegance and the other single HTs do.
LC was probably the most fertile rose I’ve ever worked with.
Almost anything would stick to it.
Now I have this one. I’m almost positive it’s a hybrid.
It’s equally fertile and everything coming out of it so far is clean as a whistle here.
Lilac Charm is the best lavender floribunda here. This seedling of Lilac Charm X Purple Heart is from 2001. The color is the same as Lilac Charm, but the fragrance is stronger and the health is better. I wish it would bloom a bit more. Someday I’m going to try budding it to see if it blooms more on rootstock than it does on its own roots.
Link: picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RxDLyDOKF1spxDQxyOaiEA?feat=directlink
LC is okay here. It blackspots and likes to stay short. Jim, I loved your seedling the first time I saw it a few years ago. I also love the color. Neptune is almost the perfect HT here – until it defoliates from BS by July. Also, the petals are so stiff and upright that it catches every drop of water possible, so it refuses to open unless it is very warm. The foliage, when present, is gorgeous. It is definitely chemical dependent for my area. I think it needs outcrossed to a non-mauve line with yellow or apricot tones in it that can bring better health to be a superior mauve HT. Mauves, like yellows, need to be interwoven with new lines to get rid of the negative qualities they’re well known for. I think Big Purple was a good start, but it is dominating the class.
I have a small lavender mini called ‘Lavender Jewel’, another of Mr Moore’s minis, whose pedigree is ‘Little Chief’ x ‘Angel Face’. It is probably one of the best minis I have here in terms of overall health, shape of the plant, and sheer volume of bloom. I’ve had it for years now and it strikes from cuttings like a weed. It doesn’t seem to suffer from ‘Angel Face Sudden Death Syndrome’ that Paul has talked about in the past. shrugs
That is a nice seedling Jim. Is it listed at HMF yet?
I’d love to see an open blossom.
Lavender Jewel is as good as it is due to Little Chief. There is quite a bit of diversity there and it is healthy!
Of the mauve minis, I really love Violet Mist. I have its sister, Sweet Arlene, too, but it doesn’t seem as healthy (mildew…)or abundant in bloom. Violet Mist has a lot of the benefits of Lagerfeld without its faults. However, it lacks in scent except when the blooms are old. Sweet Arlene is a better sniffer. Theyre both definitely minifloras, tho, but not gaudy like the majority of them (mostly exhibition types.
The basis of the russet and mauve minifloras by Dee Bennett is Blue Mist. I wish more was known of it. But I am sure that a lot of the health of Violet Mist came from it. It sure didnt come from Blue Nile 
Blue Mist is an astonishing small shrub. It is completely disease free in my garden (can’t say that for 95% of the minis I grow) and produces a remarkable volume of seed. I think it has potential to do a LOT more than just breed more miniatures, as it has been used in the past. It makes a beautifully rounded shrub to 3 X 3 feet and needs no pruning from year to year if you. don’t mind it getting large. IMO this is one of the best Moore roses, ever.
I’d grow it. I wonder if, like Gourmet Popcorn, it would make a reliable landscape shrub that could be dealt with in terms of crude commercial landscaping (trim blade style, lol)?
If I had it, I would see what it could produce if married to Bukavu. Bukavu would be wondrous if it just wasnt so HUGE.
“Lavender Jewel is as good as it is due to Little Chief. There is quite a bit of diversity there and it is healthy!”
Yes… this may be so… my point being that despite having ‘Angel Face’ as a parent it is surprisingly good… I’ve used LJ this year myself with near species diploids in the hope of making even tougher miniatures. I think that whilst the game of odds is against you if you use parents known to be weak, I also think you can get lucky and if you are in the situation where you only have such-and-such a rose, have a clear goal, and are of the opinion that I going to use this rose for THIS gene and then cull like crazy until you get what you want… then anything is possible… especially if you do as was done in this case and take something that is pretty ordinary and put it with something like ‘Little Chief’ which is rather extraordinary… then a lot of the negatives can be balanced out. A rose I am pretty smitten with at the moment is ‘Wild Rover’, bred by Colin Dickson. It’s parents were not listed on HMF until recently and I wonder if it wasn’t disclosed because one of its parents was ‘Rhapsody in Blue’; a rose that also attracts it’s fair share of bad press. ‘Wild Rover’ is, however, a far superior rose and has shown itself to be extremely fertile for me with what looks like loads of potential to breed good (and different) shrubs. Too many times have I heard people on here say things like there is no guarantee that crossing two disease resistant roses together will result in progreny that are also uniformly resistant. Also have I heard cases of poor roses spawning something far superior. I just think this rose breeding game is a fickle thing (and a case of ‘horses for courses’)… and maybe I think way to much about it, especially when I also hear of things like ‘Blue Mist’, which is supposedly the next best thing to sliced-bread, is suspected to be be descended from the equivalent of seeds bought off Ebay! Maybe I have a touch of heat stroke; it’s 40C (104F) outside at the moment… I’m still not ready to go out and splash ‘Julia’s Rose’ pollen about though…
‘Lavender Jewel’ has a Sister seedling called ‘Angel Darling’.
It’s always been a favorite of mine. I put it on ‘Lilac Charm’ a couple of seasons ago. Surprisingly I got a full sized seedling that wasn’t quite mauve.
I gave it to Kim. Hopefully he can do something with it. There’s lots of potential there.
I LOVE Blue Mist! What an interesting landscape plant and that wonderful honeysuckle scent! Totally clean here. Robert, are you sure you sent LCXAND home with me? It doesn’t look like anything around here!
Yep, I’m sure.
I try to make notes at all the HMF pages for stuff I send out. If you don’t have it no big deal. Check if you will and I’ll mark it missing in action if you can’t find it.
I might try to do something with ‘Angel Darling’ again eventually.
‘Blue Mist’ would be fun to play with.
My Blue Mist was huge! I remember all those Chihuahua teeth prickles and those miniscule hips! I don’t think I ever opened any of them, but those seeds must be microscopic! I actually found hips on Tom Thumb and Cineraire 'Cineraire' Rose and I planted them all! My eyes hurt…
‘Blue Mist’ seeds are indeed microscopic, like R. multiflora seeds. I probably have 3000 hips on my main plant of it, but I fear they may not be viable after our recent cold snap: we had nights as cold as 8F. 
If anyone wants to try germinating these, I can collect 'em. Its a fascinating plant and if it had been introduced in the right era it might have become a world-wide favorite small landscaping shrub. Instead, it remains an obscure novelty, which is truly a shame. It is a better shrub than ‘Popcorn’ or ‘Cinderella’, with never single diseased leaf and never an inch of freeze damage. It is indestructible. Perhaps its time I started crossing it with some of the available native species…
Kim,
Seeds from ‘Cineraire’??? That is perverse! Did each seed get its own pot? laughs
It would be interesting to see ‘Blue Mist’ tolerates alkaline sandy soil. I’m guessing it may not like my local conditions due to it’s affinity to multiflora…
For instance, ‘Oakington Ruby’ does great own-root here with no coddling whatsoever.
‘Pink Clouds’ grows backwards in poorly amended soil but does great in a container.
R multiflora is actually consider a dwarfing rootstock though out much of the Southwest U.S.
It would be fun to find out.
Tiny seeds often germinate very well for whatever reason.
I think Pierre mentioned this not long ago. I was disappointed to find one of my prospective new seed parents had tiny seed but sowed them anyway.
Surprise surprise! They germinate just fine.
I sowed a few hundred multiflora seeds this season to select a good plant for understocks… those seeds are tiny… but it amazes me how easy they were to handle… ‘Baby Faraux’ seeds were also tiny. ‘Snow Carpet’ made OP his last season too… you need to use a loupe to hadnle those seeds… and they too germinated (but failed to progress from there). The clinophylla seeds I have just received were small also, as were the bracteata… I actually prefer these smaller seeds as they seem, as Robert said, to have fewer germinating issues.
Another question then… if all these ‘Angel Wings’ seeds are the result of self pollinations and they have been around for a long time… are they showing any signs of inbreeding depression? Are they still worth looking at?
Yup, Cineraire and some are already germinating! As has been noted, Baby Faurax also has microscopic seeds, and they are already germinating.