Trying to conjure up a good diploid yellow to use, which won’t pass on a huge achilles heal (disease-wise) to its offspring.
Any suggestions? Or should I plan on, say, ‘Baby Love’ and fight the ploidies down the line?
Wouldn’t that limit you to either a yellow ‘species’ or an early yellow poly? What else is there that’s yellow and diploid? Are any of them known to be healthy where you are?
Philip, you might not have read my other posts on the subject of yellow roses, but Kim has. My mind is still working on it. At present I am in my mind at least “thinking” of going back in crosses with yellows. This is as I said in my mind, no doubt someone will come along and say, that can’t be done, more the reason to try. I do not think the ‘wheel’ is complete yet, needs some more spokes. As for the ‘ploidy’ thing, no idea, if they work, they work.
One other question on your post Philip is, the rose that you end up using is it going to be pollen and seed parent or only one of.
Well, geez, Kim, if I had the answer, I wouldn’t be asking. 
So your official response is “Hang the ploidy and just do it with a tetraploid!”?
well… Real hybridizers do it with diploids.
(Hey, I think that’s a quotable…)
If you can live with the uncertainty over ploidy then Francois Juranville is an option. It is not pure yellow but it does make the epoxide forms of the carotenoids. Guessing by the ancestry it is probably either triploid or diploid but no mattter which chances are good that it produces at least some diploid pollen.
For a positive diploid play try Fortunes Double Yellow. Paul Barden has remarkable seedlings from Fortuniana by Joycie.
Using the Tea X Wichurana hybrids wouldn’t produce a strong yellow. Wich. is another “Stain Eraser”, particularly for yellow. Wichurana figures rather strongly in modern hybrids as it is. To get something “new”, shouldn’t you start with less used species, Xanthina, Hugonis, Primula, perhaps Alabukensis? I don’t know what the results would be, but using a rudely healthy China such as Purpurea with them might produce some interesting color results. Purpurea, I imagine, should tend to intensify pigments. (I hope!)
Yellow Fairy is probably a triploid, but I do not know if it is pollen fertile. It starts out deep gold and fades to primrose, which is decent for a non-tetraploid yellow.
Howdy Philip;
You could use some of these if they are available in your area. It depends on how intense you want the yellow colour to be, those I have put in the list below are all diploids with substantial petal numbers which will give you some bloom form. Working with species single diploids has its benifits of incorporating new genetic material into your roses, it can take a while to obtain a descent bloom form. Although I do not mind a single or semi double bloom form, there are a lot of people out there who don’t . Sheez the pressure of a rose breeder LOL.
Altaville Saffron Yellow Noisette
Celine Forestier
Despree a Fluer Fauve
Jean Rose
Marechal Niel
Topaz Jewel
William Allen Richardson
As long as there are MORE of them, produced earlier, repeating faster, and repeating longer, bring on semi doubles! Who needs a Great Century with three, 8" flowers a year?
Kim you would n’t believe it, one year I crossed Sympathie X Virgo ( same as Gates of Eden) and got this rose , which repeated really well but he flower size was 7", had a form similar to Great Century which I did nt like so I shovelled it. They were like bread and butter plates.
I’d believe it.
Does Topaz Jewel do well in heat, Warren? It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go with a rugosa, but that’s a very interesting idea…
Wm Allen Richardson is one I have recently eyed – a surprisingly decent yellow for its class. Since it’s named after a New Orleanian, I’m gonna hafta get a cutting of it anyway…
Does anyone have experience with ‘Yellow Fairy’? ‘Yellow Fairy’ has ‘Texas’ – named for my new home – (but bred by a Dane??) in it, so…
Don, the roses you mention I don’t believe are reblooming for me here, but I confess I was wondering about wichuriana offspring. I suppose Leverkusen is tetraploid, but wonder if it warrants acquiring.
Philip,
I have Daybreak, a hybrid musk which has healthy, glossy foliage and is thornless. HMFR doesn’t list its ploidy but it’s seed parent Trier is a diploid and Danae, another Hybrid Musk with Trier as the seed parent is also listed as a diploid. I love Danae but hate the thorns. Prickles might not be an issue for you. Both are yellows, Daybreak being the darker yellow but has few petals. Both fade.
Jim P
Topaz Jewel is better in colder climates than heat, from my experience and observing it in Visalia. Ralph’s best plants were grown under high canopies of tall trees. They were the largest, fullest and most colorful. In Newhall, mid desert, it was a very unhappy plant, as was Star Delight. I saw Rountuit at Jim Delahanty’s garden in Sherman Oaks, CA, a little while ago and it was beautiful. I’m so glad that one is still around! I wish the yellow version had made it out. We took cuttings of that on one of the last trips to see Ralph and he got them to root. Imagine Golden Angel flowers on Rountuit and you have the idea. Ralph’s name choice for it was to have been “Eleventh Hour”.
Could try Crepuscule
I ordered the diploid and triploid yellow hybrid musks years ago. The ones I got (Danae, Daybreak, etc.) were all lanky and didn’t bloom that great for me and with hardiness issues here, I lost them… Some other ideas are to consider Creme Brulee. I tried to count it and didn’t have the best cells, but from what I could see it looks diploid. Golden Angel is a nice triploid with some fertility. I crossed polys onto it and got diploid offspring. Unfortunately, they were washed out peaches, but maybe with the right male the yellow would be stronger. I have a haploid (diploid) of Rise N Shine (unfertilized egg developed into an embryo) with fertility that is yellow I’m going to try to cross with healthy polys. It isn’t very healthy itself, but could be a good link. The diploid yellow single blooming species like R. hugonis and R. primula have been very very hard for me to get viable hybrids of with modern repeat bloomers. There are a couple very confused hybrids with rugosas I’ve been able to get. They don’t bloom very well, but are healthy and pretty with intermediate foliage and stems. Topaz Jewel is diploid, but has been a little tough to get seedlings from for me. People do have some hybrids of it though. Maybe crossing Persian Yellow (triploid, I counted cells multiple times from shoot apical meristems, older literature report it is tetraploid) onto diploids may be able to produce some rich yellow diploids.
My hope with this haploid of Rise N Shine is to hopefully at least get some apricot colored hybrids of it crossed with healthy pink polys.
“For a positive diploid play try Fortunes Double Yellow. Paul Barden has remarkable seedlings from Fortuniana by Joycie.”
Good lord, no…don’t go there. (and I think Don meant ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ in the second instance, not ‘Fortuniana’, since I have never used ‘Fortuniana’)
Yes, I got some interesting seedlings using ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ on ‘Joycie’, but I lost all but two of the nearly 20 large seedlings one winter when the temps dropped to 20F for five nights. Yes, thats right; it took only 20F nights to kill the majority of these seedlings. So, from a hardiness perspective, ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ isn’t going to do you any favors.
Secondly, not one of those seedlings was a repeater. The two surviving seedlings are both unremarkable pinks (one shows a slight touch of yellow at the petal base, much like ‘Tiffany’ does) and the other is an odd “dirty” pink, with peculiar muddy hues over a flat pink, and by muddy I mean hues like the color of ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ just before the petals fall. (A hue a friend of mine once described as “day-old liver left out in the sun”) The muddy pink one grows like a weed, making a large sprawly/thorny climber not unlike many of the early-ish climbing Teas (Think ‘E. Veyrat Hermanos’) but it mildews easily and no doubt would blackspot if I planted it outdoors. (It is growing in one of the greenhouses, now permanently fixed there since its roots grew through the drain holes of its pot)
Neither of these seedlings has any fertility whatsoever; I tried to set seed on both, and to use their pollen on numerous other roses, but got not one seed for the effort. For that reason alone I wouldn’t recommend ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ as a breeder, not to mention that fact that hardiness, remontancy, and the slim chance of obtaining yellow are all likely to be issues. I have filed ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ under “never again” in my book.
And then there’s ‘Crepuscule’. To the best of my knowledge it is indeed a diploid, and it is outrageously fertile as a pollen parent. Most of its offspring will be generously remontant, reasonably winter hardy (surprisingly) and a good percentage will have good-to-excellent disease resistance. Yellow hues will also be quite readily obtained as well. (All these results will depend on the breeder’s choice of seed parent, of course. I’m sure its possible to muck it up if one should choose unwisely) I would definitely recommend it as a diploid to employ in search of yellow.
See: Yellow poly from Crepuscule
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[Kim] Using the Tea X Wichurana hybrids wouldn’t produce a strong yellow. Wich. is another “Stain Eraser”, particularly for yellow.
It’s not the wichuraiana genes of wichuraiana hybrids that fade yellow, it’s the tea genes.
The strong, unfading yellows of species roses like the foetidas, xantina, hugonis and primula are due to the accumulation of epoxide forms of carotenoids, namely violaxanthin, luteoxanthin and auroxantin.
The biochemical reactions that produce these pigments are reversible. In the yellow species roses that I mentioned these reverse reactions, the ‘violaxantin cycle’, are blocked so the epoxide pigments accumulate.
There are also downstream reactions in which these epoxide compounds can be further processed and, in fact, that is how some of the perfume compounds and the plant hormone ABA are produced. In the yellow species roses these forward reactions are also substantially blocked, and the epoxide pigments can accumulate.
In tea roses neither the reversible reactions nor the forward reactions are blocked and, so, the epoxide carotenoids are consumed and the yellow color never fully develops and, that which does, fades.
Wichuraiana lacks the biochemistry for yellow pigments entirely so its progeny get their yellow genes only from the hybrid partner. I just had a good look through the F1 wichuraiana hybrids of known ancestry and found that in every case of yellow offspring there is a strong element of tea roses in the ancestry of the hybrid partner.
Yellow wichuraiana hybrids obey the rule that the closer the hybrid partner is to the R. foetida persica species ancestor, the stronger the yellow content. See, for example, the Barbier roses Jacotte and Helen Hayes and the Brownell rose Primevère and compare these to Van Fleet’s Glenn Dale, Horvath’s Gardenia and Shoup’s Republic of Texas.
[Kim] To get something “new”, shouldn’t you start with less used species, Xanthina, Hugonis, Primula, perhaps Alabukensis?
Why not include Persiana and foetida? Soleil d’Or and all the modern yellow roses derived from it carry the yellow-degrading tea traits from Antoine Revoir. A century down the road we finally have some refined hybrids that accumulate high levels of epoxide carotenoids. This means that recombination has eliminated a lot of that tea/chinensis influence. You would certainly get something “new” from programs incorporating hybrids of Persiana with Cal Poly, Sutters Gold, Joycie, Golden Horizons and similar roses.
A daring strategy would be to cross Persiana or foetida with wichuraiana then backcross with wichuraiana to keep the yellow and lose the rest of the foetida baggage.
The lesser used yellow species are not necessarily equal to the foetidas in their yellow genes, btw. For instance, hugonis degrades the epoxides to beta-citraurin, meaning that the downstream processes are not as fully blocked in hugonis as they are in the foetidas. Still, they are going to produce far stronger and more stable yellows than most other roses.
[Kim] Purpurea, I imagine, should tend to intensify pigments.
An interesting case. Lacking, as it does, yellow pigments you could guess that the same condition applies as with wichuraiana, that progeny would get their yellow genes from the hybrid partner. Only one way to find out.
[Paul B.] I have filed ‘Fortune’s Yellow’ under “never again” in my book.
Understandable given your more recent experience but too bad because it offers an interesting color palatte. It makes both cyanin and peonin which are usually mutually exclusive, so that the anthocyanin precurrsors must be highly up-regulated. It also accumulates epoxide carotenoids in exception to the usual tendency of the chinensis derived yellows (‘teas’). I think it pounding on it carries a high reward potential for someone able to absorb the risks.
BTW I did mean Fortune’s Double Yellow, aka R. odorata x pseudoindica in case someone wants to look at the pigment profile in Table 4 of Eugster.
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Thanks Don! Even with the darker tones of pink to red, though, you have to get four generations away from Wichurana, and then have it only on one side, to get deep colors. Dr. Huey was the first dark colored “Door yard rose” out of it and is only about one-eigth Wichurana. Paul succeeded in obtaining deeper tones from 0-47-19 in a self with 42-03-02 , but even it demonstrates the fade I associate with both Floradora and Wichurana hybrids. I’m using it heavily this year with any species and species hybrid pollen that makes itself available. I pretty much have had to as it’s the only rose which has flowered heavily here so far.
David, if you’d like cuttings of 1-72-1, the sister of Rise’n Shine (1-72-2), I’ll be happy to share with you. Ralph used it instead of Rise’n Shine because it yeilds yellow offspring where Rise’n Shine produces pastels. It will mildew, but he felt it gave healthier seedlings than it was.
Should anyone wish to begin this with a thornless variation, I also still have Basye’s Thornless Wichurana, which roots like Bermuda Grass and will be happy to share cuttings of it, also. I’ve kept it not so much for any plans I have for it, but in hopes of preventing its loss and getting it spread around as far and wide as I can.
THank you, everyone, for all the thoughts. One of the plants I own that I am particularly interested in playing with is R. banksia lutescens. The banksias are essentially disease-free in my hot climate (though I realize they and their offspring will have a tendancy to mildew in cooler areas) and intrigue me as they are somewhat under-utilized in breeding.
Saw nothing on banksias in the Eugster paper, though I haven’t had time to fully wade through it.
Truthfully, I worry that overloading on too much knowledge might inhibit inspired crosses. Sometimes it seems that the darned plants don’t read the scientific studies, and so they go ahead and do their own thing anyway.
It’s kinda like the old quote: “According to recognized aerotechnical tests, the bumblebee cannot fly… But the Bumblebee doesn’t know this, so he goes ahead and flies anyway.”