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Progress
in my Hybridizing Program,
Part 3
My efforts at breeding new spotted roses has focused on the use of the Portland Damask 'Marbrée' as a parent. To date, however, the spotting trait has not appeared in any of the progeny, except for a small group of self-pollinated seedlings, all of which have poor vigor and mediocre markings. While my early attempts at using 'Marbrée' showed promise, the lack of spotted seedlings, the large percentage of non-remontant, impossible to propagate offspring has discouraged me from proceeding with this rose. And so last year I returned to 'Alain Blanchard' as a breeding plant, crossing it with various modern roses in the hopes that some offspring may carry the spotting. I am particularly hopeful that the combination of 'Sequoia Ruby' X 'Alain Blanchard' may give me some hopeful seedlings. 'Sequoia Ruby' will hopefully make the offspring easy to root, as well as pass on latent remontancy. At this time I have about 7 seedlings that are poised to flower for the first time in the Spring of 2005, and one in particular has excellent vigor and beautiful foliage that is intermediate between the two parents. I am hopeful that the spotting may come through in some of this cross. If it does, then the plan would be to proceed by selfing or sibling crossing to intensify the desirable traits and bring out the repeat blooming characteristic. It is a longterm goal that will undoubtedly require several generations to get results, but I think a 3 X 3 foot shrub with dark crimson-purple spotted blooms that repeats all Summer long is a worthwhile goal. I may also involve some of the China roses in this breeding line, as I recall that someone once told me that Chinas were more likely breed offspring with marked blooms than other types. We shall see! A few years ago I became entranced by the 'Chapeau de Napoleon' hybrids with their Parsley-like frilled sepals. (Note: 'Chapeau de Napoleon', or R. centifola cristata is often listed as a member of the Moss family, which it is not. This is a distinct race of roses that sported from R. centifolia and should be considered in a class of its own) Most notable of these special roses is Ralph Moore's beautiful 'Crested Sweetheart', a hybrid of 'Little Darling' X 'Chapeau de Napoleon'. In many ways, this could be thought of as an improved 'Chapeau de Napoleon', with better vigor, greater generosity of bloom, while retaining the excellent fragrance and crested sepals of its pollen parent. Sadly, 'Crested Sweetheart' has been shown to be quite sterile and has not generated any offspring. However, another hybrid from the same cross, called 'Crested Jewel', is highly fertile and a whole race of new crested roses has been born at Sequoia Nursery using it as a parent. (As of January 2005, the 'Crested Jewel' hybrids are still in development and have not seen commercial release. However, a new related hybrid called 'Closer to Heaven' will be released in Spring 2005. It came from a cross involving 'Queen Elizabeth, Rosa wichuraiana and 'Chapeau de Napoleon'.)
My own work with the 'Chapeau de Napoleon' hybrids has been very slow and only modestly successful to date. As Ralph Moore has found out, as soon as you cross the crested roses with anything else, much of the cresting disappears. And yet to achieve remontancy in these roses, outcrossing to modern repeat bloomers is necessary. Therefore, the hybridizer must select the best of the seedlings, cross them with each other in various combinations and hope for the best. Most of the time, the cresting is lost completely, but occasionally some of it is preserved. Often, the cresting is the only thing that a seedling is saved for. There is one Moore seedling that came from a cross of 'Little Darling' and 'Crested Jewel' that is fully remontant, blooms in nice clusters and has excellent cresting on the sepals. However, the plant lacks vigor, Blackspots, and the bloom is a dull medium pink with only seven or eight petals. Although it always attracts attention when it is covered in bright green frilly buds, it is little more than a curiosity, since it has not resulted in anything worthwhile in all of the attempts to breed it. One of the most curious seedlings I have found among my crosses is one non-remontant hybrid that resulted from a cross of ('Nuits de Young' X 'Tuscany Superb') X 'Chapeau de Napoleon'. Because of its ancestry, there is no chance of latent remontancy in it, but it is a very interesting plant in its own right. It grows much like a typical small Moss, with twiggy upright growth to about 4 feet, and heavily prickled. Blooms are about 3” across, with 35 petals or so, in a dark mauve-pink color, sometimes showing purplish edges to the petals. Its most fascinating feature is its buds, which are both crested and mossed! I know of no other hybrid that combines both of these features in one plant. Sadly, this rose is very difficult to propagate and lacks vigor. I may work with it in further breeding, but I have little hope to accomplish much with it. It will simply remain in my garden as a curiosity. One of the earliest and most influential Hybrid Musks is 'Trier', bred in 1904 by Peter Lambert. It is believed to be a hybrid involving R. multiflora and 'Reve d'Or'. Joseph Pemberton used it extensively in breeding his own line of Hybrid Musks, including 'Pax', 'Clytemnestra', 'Danaë' and 'Felicia'. One of its big assets in breeding is its ability to produce extremely free-flowering offspring with good disease resistance. Often, good fragrance is inherited in the deal as well. With these things in mind in 2003, I made a few crosses with some of my favorite Miniatures. The most successful cross was 'Joycie' X 'Trier', which gave me about 100 seedlings. As they developed, I was concerned that these seedlings would not flower in their first year, since many of them got over a foot tall before they showed flower buds. However, as they continued to make growth they budded up quickly and most of them bloomed by the end of June. The cross is labeled “69-03” and I selected about 20 seedlings from this cross. Most of them were heavily influenced by 'Trier', with very large panicles of 1.5 inch blooms varying in color from clear canary yellow, through soft oranges and apricots to warm medium pinks and a few near-whites. Many of these began to take on very “Noisette-like” appearances as they grew and a number of them had a very sweet fragrance. My favorite selections were the highly fragrant ones in soft yellows and pinks with great vigor and panicles of fifty blooms or more. These selections have great potential to make moderate sized shrubs with immense bloom displays. I have hopes that these seedlings will also have superior disease resistance when planted out in the test plot.
Although 'Joycie' is a somewhat typical HT-shaped Miniature with medium vigor, it has the ability to pass on some excellent traits in its offspring, including vigor, good color, and surprisingly, often imparts good fragrance. Kim Rupert has a seedling he is testing that is a cross of 'Joycie' and 'Basye's Blueberry' which has one of the best “old rose” fragrances I have smelled in a modern hybrid. Another of my crosses from 2003 is 'Joycie' X 'Comte de Chambord', made with the notion that 'Comte de Chambord' can pass on good vigor, remontancy and beautiful fragrance. This seedling group, about 120 individuals, was very vigorous, with a wide range of foliage and growth habits. None of these flowered in 2004, but I did select about 15 of the best looking plants to grow on to blooming size. I expect all of these will flower in Spring 2005. Curiously, many crosses using roses like the Portland Damasks do not become repeat-bloomers until their second or even third year. Who knows why this works the way it does? Anyway, with any luck, this group of seedlings may offer some interesting plants that might at least have some potential as breeding plants. This coming season I expect to continue working with Ralph Moore's Rambler, “0-47-19” (R. wichuraiana X 'Floradora') in an attempt to create new fully remontant Ramblers. In the early 1900's the Barbier Frères & Compagnie nursery was working feverishly to create a new breed of Ramblers using R. wichuraiana, and with great success. Still extant are cultivars like 'Paul Transom', 'Albertine', 'François Juranville', and 'Albéric Barbier', all very much deserving of their longevity in commerce. Most of these beautiful hybrids came out of crosses using R. wichuraiana as the seed parent and various Chinas and Teas as the pollen parent. Having worked for three years with “0-47-19”, with its 1.5 inch blooms on a wildly rampant Rambler with fish-hook thorns, I can imagine how tedious the work much have been using the species form, with its tiny flowers. (Ralph Moore tells me that years ago he used to allow “0-47-19” to grow along the ground as it pleased at his nursery. To pollinate the flowers, he had to work on his hands and knees, undoubtedly a most tiresome task! He soon began training the plant on a trellis to make the job much easier.) Although the Barbier Ramblers are superb and beautiful hybrids, the majority of them are non-remontant. The few that do repeat, do so only modestly, sometimes offering only a few rare blooms in the Fall, as 'Albéric Barbier' does. This is their only real drawback, although Winter-hardiness could be improved in many cases as well. Their Tea background has made a number of them rather tender in cold climates. And so, my desire to create new Wichuraiana style Ramblers has led me to select Moore's “0-47-19” as the parent to focus on. Not only does it impart all of the best of the Wichuraiana qualities, such as vigorous Rambler growth, beautiful foliage and good hardiness, it has the added advantage of giving a percentage of fully remontant offspring, not just a few blooms here and there, as the first generation R. wichuraiana hybrids do. Interestingly, Mendelian genetics would suggest that when a plant like “0-47-19” is crossed with another rose that has full remontancy, then 50% of the offspring will be remontant. In practice, it hasn't worked this way; I have obtained no more than about 30% remontant seedlings from such crosses. This illustrates just how little we really know about remontancy in roses. I tend to believe, as others have suggested, that remontancy is controlled by a variety of genes and not one single gene. There may be an entirely different gene responsible for the repeat blooming ability in the Damask Perpetuals versus the Chinas, or the Hybrid Teas. It is possible also that remontancy is the result of the complete absence of a gene that makes a rose once-blooming. There is so much we don't know for sure, and that is what makes rose breeding both exciting and frustrating.
The 2004 crop of seedlings from “0-47-19” was my best so far, partly because of the sheer volume of seedlings grown. The cross of “0- 47-19” X 'Abraham Darby' gave me about 120 seedlings, from which only about five or six individuals were kept. As I said earlier, no more than 30% of this group flowered this year, and so I selected only from this group. Many were very poor plants with pale, shapeless blooms and a proneness to mildew, which is why so few selections were kept for growing on. By the end of the 2004 season, only two remained. One is a lovely peach colored seedling, with 3” blooms of about 40 petals arranged in a cupped form. There is a nice Apple fragrance, but it is a bit mild. The other seedling is one I consider to be one of the top ten seedlings of the entire year. It is an extremely vigorous climber, very much like 'New Dawn' in habit and foliage, but with larger, much more fully double blooms in a warm blush pink. In just its first season, this seedling grew several four foot canes and was in bloom almost constantly, which bodes well for its performance in the future. The bloom style is very Old Rose, with many petals packed in a flattish bloom, and it has a very nice Apple scent, like its sibling, but much stronger. I will be watching this seedling closely and I have great hopes that it will be an excellent new rose in the Rambler style. While I feel I could go on endlessly about the exciting developments in my breeding program, I had best stop for now. The true joy of working with hybridizing new roses is that the work always has something new to offer, to teach me. Its hard to imagine that anyone could tire of such fascinating work. I feel blessed to have “wandered” into such a rewarding career, and even moreso that so many people have reached out to help me in my work, Ralph Moore and his staff in particular. The icing on the cake is that so many people have also shown great enthusiasm for the hybrids I have introduced. I look forward to many more years of hard work to bring new roses to the world. Copyright © 2005 Paul Barden, All Rights Reserved. Not to be reproduced without the express permission of the author.
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