11-02-07: 'Sequoia Ruby' X 'Guinée'

This seedling is the sole surviving seedling from a cross made in 2002 between 'Sequoia Ruby' and the magnificent old climbing Hybrid Tea 'Guinée', bred by Charles Mallerin in 1938. The idea behind this cross was to increase bloom production and frequency ('Guinée' is not very generous with bloom) while preserving the rich crimson of 'Guinée'. To be expected, the fragrance of 'Guinée' was lost, but this seedling accomplished some of the other goals, namely the deep coloring and the improved rate of repeat. While I'm sure there were other seedlings from this cross, I don't recall what any of them looked like and ultimately this was the only one saved.

11-02-07 is fully fertile in both directions. I suspect it is a tetraploid but I have not bothered to check. It frequently passes on deep red coloring to its progeny, and seedlings tend to be an equal mix of dwarf and full-sized shrubs. The dwarf seedlings tend to have poor vigor and/or disease problems, but that can be said of many breeding plants, so nothing new there. I can't say that fragrance is a trait commonly passed on to its offspring, but then I am not currently using it to breed for fragrance. For the most part I am using it to breed with the Canadian Explorer roses to create richer colors in the Winter hardy shrub line. Results are still rather early to offer much commentary about, but this line of work looks promising. This Spring I will be evaluating a group of seedlings of the cross 11-02-07 X L83. The latter is a R. kordesii seedling developed by Dr. Felicitas Svejda specifically for the creation of Winter hardy and Blackspot free shrubs. (I'll talk a bit about L83 in an upcoming post, and discuss some of the offspring I've generated from it.)

Next post: a brief biography of 50-05-02, a seedling from a cross of 11-02-07 and 'Dragon's Blood'