Where can I buy hybrid rose hips / rose seeds?

General Discussion
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Hey, it’s me again, I hope you all are having a wonderful day! :hugs:

Briefly, I’m not a professional breeder but an amateur gardener who is interested in growing roses from seeds because I think it’s exciting to see what will pop out from them, so that, since rose seeds (apart from garden party rose seeds, which I already have) aren’t really a thing you can buy (actually you can, as you know, the problem is they have a limited commercial availability) and grow… could you tell me where (or from whom) can I buy rose seeds that aren’t botanical species or garden party variety?

I’m interested in growing Rouletii, Oakington ruby, pompon de Paris, Unermüdliche, and other dwarf chinas such as sí, perla de alcanada, estrellita de oro, baby Faurax, perla de Montserrat, and other lawranceanas / dwarf chinas?

As I implicitly stated before, I’m aware they don’t breed true from seed, it doesn’t matter at all, in fact, this surprise factor is a plus I really appreciate, I just want to grow them and see what I will get -one of the reasons I want to grow them from seed is because I live in Mexico so that importation of cuttings and living plants is kind of expensive / complicated-!

TYSM in advance for your help! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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You should state where you are located as it is very difficult to get plant material of any kind into many countries without the appropriate paperwork. That includes seeds. From experience, the inspections required for the appropriate paperwork to export legally are expensive and a royal pain, which is why I won’t do it.

Beware of buying seeds of any kind through Ebay and the other online selling sites as they often are NOT what is advertised. I’ve known folks who purchased “rose seeds” and raised weeds from them.

Your best bet would be to ask for them on sites such as this or perhaps Garden Web/Houzz in the “Roses” or “Antique Roses” forums, Antique Roses Forum - GardenWeb , as long as you are located within the continental United States.

The main issue I foresee for you is there aren’t as many people growing the varieties you ask about as there was a decade ago. Add Si and Hi don’t set seed in my experience. They may form hips but they are most often empty.

A Premium membership to Help Me Find-Roses will help you greatly. It costs $24 a YEAR and opens all the search areas you need to research roses on the site. For example, searching sources for Perla de Alcanada, the gardens growing it which are listed, the first two are archives to show was USED to exist but is no longer. John Bagnasco’s Home Garden and Friends of Vintage Gardens list they grow it but they are associated with a rose society for auctions (in John’s case) and their own fund raising in Vintage’s case. Neither is likely to be able to assist in obtaining seeds from their collection. The final garden is the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden. Their interactive on line catalog shows they no longer have that rose. https://fm70.triple8.net/fmi/webd/HRGMaster

Unfortunately, none of the nurseries listed as selling the rose is in the United States so if you are, your best bet is to watch for the CCRS rose auctions (which is associated with the Bagnasco garden) https://www.ccrsauction.com/ and the Friends of Vintage https://thefriendsofvintageroses.org/ sales to see if they are ever listed as available from those sources. CCRS ships, Vintage does not. Looking up Montserrat, the availability is even more restricted. Faurax should be fairly easily obtainable (Burlington should have it) and a number of us grow it. Estrellita de Oro nearly doesn’t exist anywhere in comparison. Rouletii, Pompon de Paris and Oakington Ruby should be relatively easier to obtain.

Unfortunately, for rose availability, you are about forty years too late. Availability of odd, weird and wonderful things reached its last zenith in the US in the late eighties to nearly mid nineties. Then, there were MANY mom and pop mini nurseries around the country, offering all sorts of wonders. Miniature Plant Kingdom brought in material from all over the world, sometimes even legally! Sequoia Nursery offered a selection unlikely to ever be seen again here. Definitely search the lists from Burlington Roses, available by emailing BurlingtonRoses@aol.com and requesting her mini and large rose lists. Again, though, only if you’re in the US as I don’t believe she exports.

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Oh, I’m sorry for causing such a hassle, my bad, answering to your question, I live in Mexico and I don’t know how to modify my profile to add that info!

I’ve bought seeds from overseas in the past, in fact, this is the only way I can grow ID roses because there are no official rose distributors in this country (in nurseries and garden centres you can only find no ID roses); for instance, the garden party roses I grew this year are from a seed supplier located in the Baltics, so I have a little experience on seed importation from overseas and, as long as postal service doesn’t detect them, you can get almost any kind of seed you want!

It doesn’t matter if I can’t get seeds of all of the roses varieties I want, I would be really happy and satisfied if I just get a few of them (I’m particularly interested in Rouletii, Oakington ruby, baby Faurax, and pompon de Paris… but other dwarf chinas and their hybrids are really welcomed), so again, I may adapt my requests to what is available out there!

Forty years ago my mother was barely an adult, I’m aware I’m kind of late right now but that’s something I can’t really change because I was born in very late nineties when B. Spears released …BOMT (my username)! :joy:

TYSM for such a detailed response! I really appreciate it! :heart_hands:t2:

PS: Burling doesn’t ship overseas, at least not to Mexico and Canada (it’s stated on HMF) and I doubt she sells rose seeds! :frowning:

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No worries, you haven’t caused any hassles. You may be able to obtain seeds and such more easily than we can here in the US, I don’t know. Your Agriculture Department would be the determining body about that. I totally get the “want”, as I’ve been there MANY times and I also understand the joy of finding. I hope knowing where you are helps open doors to get you what you desire. Fingers crossed!

It’s been a while since I’ve altered my profile so I don’t remember how to do it off the top of my head. Hopefully, someone will have that information to share faster than I find where to dig it out.

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Hello BabyOneMoreTime, a warm welcome from me too!

You can find under the tab button ‘Preferences’ the button ‘Profile’. There you can add your location. I hope this information helps and will work this way.

I wish you the best of luck in your project!

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Church- and grave-yards tend to have at least a few to several roses growing in them. Many are very old varieties. Botanical Gardens and parks also might be a source of rose-hips. ALWAYS ASK FIRST.

It’s easy to select for dwarf and early-bloom (and thus repeat-flowering) characteristics from the resulting seedlings. Even ‘Mutabilis’ has given me small offspring of rather polyantha-like character.

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Exporting even rose seeds to Mexico requires a USDA Phytosanitary Certificate, and as Kim has said, that paperwork is cumbersome and very expensive. For that reason, I won’t export plant material anymore either. Exporting plant material from the USA without proper documentation makes the sender subject to federal fines, and I know someone who had that happen to them (it was an accident that paperwork was omitted) and there’s no way I would want to be in that situation.

Unfortunate, because I could supply as much Oakington Ruby seed as you could possibly want. My plant is 23 years old and stands 8 feet tall now!

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Old estates with neglected gardens likely have big plants of older varieties. You have to ask if anyone remembers the names, or morely likely ID them yourself. I did a lot of that sort of thing back when, apple trees, and later on roses at old houses. Or think of the older parts of towns, formerly nice homes getting quite old. Usually no one bothers to eradicate established plants, esp something like roses which are at least nice to look at. Some with few thorns would fail to raise ire in tenants, some with lots of thorns would simply protect themselves. The best part of local collecting is that you know the parents grow well in your conditions of climate and soil. Alleys may have roses that have spilled over walls, or even seedlings that established themselves. I remember seeing a yellow rose in Nashville TN that I figured was ‘Carefree Sunshine’ - it was covered in hips.

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And little old ladies LOVE to share cuttings and seeds and tell you about their plants. Chances are, one little old lady who loves flowers knows someone else who does, or there’s a place she admires with lots of flowers. They’ve had whole lifetimes to notice where the roses are.

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Don’t forget that some of the Hybrid musks have parentage from polyanthas. If you can manage to buy just a few varieties with the colors or other attributes you want, you can wait for your locally collected seeds to grow up to make your crosses, winding up with the sort of parentage we see from the professionals, some named variety X a seedling of some other named variety. I myself as a total rose novice found the usual red China in Florida, and Camille Prince de Rohan in Tennessee. I was given many older ramblers and gallicas by other local rose nuts.
Most exciting for me is that I found ‘Aloha’ growing in multiple lawns in a poor little Tennessee town. It’s near McMinnville, a long time nursery town, and I’m assuming it must have been propagated there. But the really revealing part is that I didn’t find a single house with just one Aloha. Every house that had it, had 2, except the two houses that had 4 plants. This is a great rose, well adapted to our area, and people rooted plants and made more of them for themselves and their friends.

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@big_ears The OP is in Mexico, and is looking specifically for seed from some of the very early dwarf Chinas.

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Yes, and what better place to look for them than in Mexico? I guess you had money to buy plants you wanted, but when I was younger, I had no money to spare for flowers.
If it is impossible or impractical to import such plants or such seeds, he may find them in Mexico, with a crop of hips already on them.
For over 10 years I was a young mother who stopped at old house sites and abandoned or empty houses to scrounge free fruit for my children. When we lived in town, I explored older neighborhoods by bike looking for fruit and nut trees. By the time I was interested in roses, I had less free time but I have certainly enountered my fair share of famous old roses in alleys and old neighborhoods, and on country roads.

The world was a safer place then, and I looked quite harmless. But little old ladies still exist, old rose bushes still exist in old rundown neighborhoods and estates. Maybe newspaper ads or libraries or local ag teachers or their students could help.

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The OP is looking for specific varieties of the early dwarf Lawranceana roses. I think the odds of finding (let alone identifying) any of those anywhere is extremely low. How many plants of Roulettii and Oakington Ruby have you encountered in your travels?

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TYSM for this, I’ll update my profile right now! :blush:

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I don’t think what you said is completely true. I think finding rose seeds in the US is easier because you have a lot of rose collectors who may provide freshly harvested seeds from their own gardens, and specialised niche sellers and official distributors (Kordes, Meilland, Tantau, Delbard, Jackson & Perkins, etcetera) that may sold a few of them to you.

My experience tells me otherwise, for instance, garden party rose seeds (I think in the US they are called angel rose) are relatively easy to find and buy in North America (Renee’s Garden sells them on their online store, and Buzzy Seeds sells garden kits of several plants, and one of those kits contains angel rose seeds) whereas in Mexico, I had a really hard time looking for an overseas (no Mexican sellers knew what was I looking for) seller that was willing to ship to my home address because most of them requested phytosanitary certification which are heavily bureaucratic procedures and documentation which is inaccessible to the general public! Fortunately, I found a British seller that accepted to sell a few of them to me sneaking them inside a brochure and shipping it as an envelope through EMS by royal mail… so, if I had a really hard time finding the most common rose seed strain (besides botanical species), imagine how difficult would it be to find other types of rose seeds! I think that would be impossible if I had to rely on what I can legally import according to customs laws.

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I’ve been looking for rose bushes in this places (and abandoned houses and buildings too) and so far I have found nothing. I live in a tropical savanna-like region (temps are hot to mild -winter- year round) so people here prioritise tropical hardy perennials such as ixora, bougainvillea, nerium, adenium, Arabian jasminum, brunfelsia, and plumbago because you don’t need to look after them, therefore, roses (which are temperate hardy perennials) aren’t really that common (they are susceptible to leaf cutter ants and heat waves) because they are medium to high maintenance plants.

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Oh! I see and it’s OK, I wouldn’t want you to be in administrative or legal trouble because of my fault! I appreciate your comment anyways! If it were possible, I’d love to buy some of your rose seeds… and some of your rose hybrids too (long time ago, I wanted to buy oui and si plus plus, which were bred by you, but Burling told me it’s impossible to ship them outside America)! :heart_hands:t2::two_hearts:

I didn’t know shipping plant material / samples overseas was outlawed in America! I mean, I’ve bought a lot of seeds (F1 hybrid Californian poppies, swan river daisy, felicia, coreopsis rosea, eustoma exaltatum, etcetera), I can’t find in Mexico on eBay several times, and no seller has ever told me it was dangerous to them to do so… maybe they don’t know they may be subject to federal fines, but who knows!

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I’ve been doing what you are suggesting, but at least up to now, my urban exploration hasn’t yielded any results yet! :pleading_face:

TYSM for your advice! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::heart_hands:t2:

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I might try this if I see a rose bush in a garden from an inhabited house! I would feel a little embarrassed, but what’s the worst thing that could happen? :flushed_face:

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Oh! That’s really exciting! I’d love to explore neighbourhoods and towns full of ancient rare roses and hearty people who is always willing to share both their rose plants and info about them.

It’s a pity there isn’t a culture of rose appreciation here in Mexico, so I can’t go through the same experience you are describing (there are no rose gardens here in Mexico, not even sections of botanical gardens devoted to show rose varieties to the people, so you can get an idea of how difficult is to find both old rose and modern rose varieties of any kind here)! :pleading_face: