Congratulations Jeff! I’m glad the crested roses appear to have taken. That’s great! April Mooncrest has been throwing some pretty amazing basals which break into massive sprays at their tips.
If you’re aiming for mini flora and smaller shrubs, traditional shrubs and HTs aren’t going to give you the dwarf, bushy, incessantly flowering plants you’re looking for. Minis are more the way to go. The two which have lived up to their disease resistance recommendations here have been Pink Petticoat and Cal Poly. Both are proving to be incredibly easy to work with, too, producing large hips with decent sized seed. Both are readily available from Burlington. You want multiples of each so you can produce many hips from the same cross without having to wait for the one plant to rebloom. I have four of each in two gallon cans and they’re sucking up most of the pollens I have ready for them. If your Cal Poly rusts, you’re not watering it enough. Bump up the moisture and watch the rust disappear.
Look at Jim’s First Impression. Amazing yellow rose! And, zero prickles so far. This thing is a flowering fool and totally healthy so far here.
I don’t know anything about it other than what HMF says, but Engelmann’s Quest really looks intriguing. F. J.Lindheimer also has a rather intriguing parentage. Gideon Lincecum has an interesting lineage, too. Minnie Bell,
Republic of Texas , Thomas Affleck, also have interesting things behind them, and so far, no one seems to be mining these interesting combinations.
Personally, I didn’t find other things there which would interest me for breeding. Not that some interesting things might not be possible from some of the others, but here, I’ve found using OGRs for the most part, results in some pretty severe foliage issues. For more severe climates, perhaps that would work well, but my season is endless and getting more extreme by the year. They have some interesting older HTs, but most of them have already been bred to death. How can you expect to create something new from the same old, over used ingredients? I avoided Mike Shoup’s creations for which there were no listed parents, and I tried to avoid anything with Austin roses in them as much as possible. In my climate, they want to climb. That’s too counter productive keeping your goals in mind.
I’d think if you concentrated on the really healthy varieties with the better minis, you could afford to throw a Hybrid Tea or floribunda into the mix occasionally without doing any major damage to the line.