I’ve updated this page below with some pictures of the hips and seeds that I’ve collected this season, from my hybrid seedlings of the following parentage:
Rosa bracteata X (rugosa X palustris).
Percentage-wise, most of the hips abort; but enough mature, to keep these hybrids from being a hybridizing “dead-end”. Even with only 1-8 seeds per hip, and only half of those being “sinkers” in a water test (the palustris ancestry could give viable “floaters” anyway), I still think there’s a lot of potential here.
By the way, none of my intentional pollinations have succeeded on these hybrids – all of these hips are from open-pollination.
Link: www.koolpages.com/hybridizer/Rose/two_bracteata_hybrids.html
Those are fantastic Tom. I was disappointed to read about damping off, a problem for me too.
I am experimenting wit dilute fish emulsion. If I start getting any losses I am going to try Serenade this season.
I just bought some fish emulsion too. I’m hoping that’ll help next time I’m having a problem.
By the way, I was just over at my parents house during my lunch and was looking at those bracteata hybrids again.
I’m gonna have to get a picture showing the monstrous size of these guys. I hadn’t paid much attention to that, the other day when I was harvesting the hips – I was just trying not to lose too much blood (high winds and thorny canes whipping all around ;0).
Robert,
I got a picture of those bracteata hybrids with my 6 ft tall co-worker standing beside them for size comparison; and added that to the previous page (link above).
Something I’ve been pondering for several days now is how it happens that some of these hybrids are pink and some are white. Both the rugosa and the palustris, that I used in the rugosa X palustris pollen parent, were pinks. And all of the F2 open-pollinated seeds of that pollen parent have been pinks. So I wonder… does one of these species have a dominant pink and the other a recessive pink? Or does bracteata have a pink inhibitor that only works on one of the species pinkness? Is there some other explanation that I’m missing?
Tom