Proving fertility of the R. fedtschenkoana hybrids.

A few years back, Kim Rupert graciously shared with me one of his experimental hybrids, 'Orangeade' X R. fedtschenkoana, a white flowered species-like hybrid designed to be used as a breeder plant. It took a while for my plant to settle into its invironment, but settle in it did! It is now a thicket (ever-spreading, I might add) about 8 feet across and 10 feet high. Contrary to expectations for such a cross, it does rebloom, although only modestly. Mine does not set seed, but offers potently fertile pollen.

The cross 54-08, made in 2008, combined this fedtschenkoana hybrid with 'Midnight Blue', a marvelous Carruth hybrid with a deliciously mixed pedigree. (I look at hybrids with widely varied genetic backgrounds as an indicator of potential health and vigor; stirring the same old pot of genes is deadly)

54-08-03 was one of the first of about ten seedlings to bloom, and one of about four that I have selected for further breeding. Blooms are actually more lavender than they appear in photos. I recently germinated the first seedlings of crosses using this seedling, and some of its siblings. I don't know where this breeding line is going to end up taking me, but the R. fedtschenkoana genes are proving to be capable of imparting unique foliage, architecture and vigor traits to offspring. Seedlings also tend to hold on to the unusual "linseed oil" scent of the species parent. Not everyone is going to appreciate this fragrance, but I like its uniqueness. The foliage also tends to have a Pine-Cedar scent to it.

Busy day ahead; breeding has begun in earnest in the past 24 hours, as the main stud house explodes into bloom. I must go attend!

It only took a year.

R. glauca X ('Orangeade' R. fedtschenkoana)

This cross was planted in late February of 2010, and this is one of two seedlings that germinated in the tray.....a full year later! I had a feeling that these R. glauca seeds might take quite a while to germinate, so I kept the flat for a year. Good thing I did!

I'm not at all sure what to expect from a cross like this, but I am quite certain there will be no reblooming seedlings here. Like many hybridizers, I am interested in R. glauca because of its exceptionally graceful shrub architecture, and its unique bluish/pink tinted foliage. (Not to mention its excellent Winter hardiness, something most modern remontants lack entirely) The Rupert-bred R. fedtschenkoana hybrid that played pollen donor also has some unique traits, including its shrubby bush form and matte foliage that, while a bright grass green itself, tends to pass on bluish tones to its offspring. If I'm very lucky, I might find this is a match that emphasizes blue-tinted foliage so valued in R. glauca. It is a difficult species to work with, apparently, and even germinating the seeds, as I have seen, can be a challenge.

Further reading: Louis Riel is one of the more interesting R. glauca hybrids in commerce, and has been proven fertile in breeding. Very interesting indeed.

Fedtschenkoana hybrids: 20-09

20-09: L83 X (Orangeade X R. fedtschenkoana)

I was genuinely surprised to see these seeds germinate this Spring, and even as they grew I expected them to turn out to be selfs of L83. Now that they are a couple months old, its quite clear these are R. fedtschenkoana hybrids, with the matte bluish foliage that smells of Pine when rubbed. All three of these are remarkably intermediate in look between their parents. I can see distinct L83 qualities, and clear R. fedtschenkoana traits in all three. Of course, none of these has bloomed yet and I don't expect to see flowers until next Spring, but in terms of their pedigree, these represent potentially remarkable hybrids, unlike anything else before them.

Its curious how, after 15 years of hybridizing, I am now paying so very little attention to the flower style and color, favoring instead the development of unique and sturdier shrubs with better hardiness than their predecessors. (Click on the thumbnails for a full-sized image)

Shown here are a few images of all three plants, their overall appearance, foliage and thorns.

54-08-08

54-08-08 = 'Midnight Blue' X ('Orangeade' X R. fedtschenkoana) The pollen parent is a white semi-double rose bred by Kim Rupert, who generously donated a plant to my collection several years ago.

This is a mightily vigorous seedling, having produced new basal growths recently that have grown from zero to three feet in only three weeks. I am pleased to note two things: 1) this plant has set seed easily using a variety of pollen parents, and 2) it is repeating bloom in flushes, where in its first year it did not bloom at all. One of its siblings has proven extremely easy to propagate and I will be testing this cultivar for ease of propagation soon as well. I think this has promise as a potential link to new kinds of shrubs for the modern, low-maintenance garden.

54-08-01, another R. fedtschenkoana seedling opens a bloom.

Yesterday I posted a photo of the first bloom of one of my 54-08 hybrids (Midnight Blue X [Orangeade X R. fedtschenkoana]). Today, two more opened their first blooms, and one of these, 54-08-01, is pretty spectacular: deep fuchsia/purple blooms about 2" across, with 15 petals and a modest fragrance. The plant is nearly identical to all of its siblings in most ways, showing heavy influence of R. fedtschenkoana: small, fern-like cedar-scented foliage, upright growth and plenty of needle-like prickles. There is a tiny bit more info available on the HMF page for this seedling.

I have gathered the pollen from the two blooms shown here and hope to use it tomorrow. I have to ruminate a bit to select an appropriate parent from what is in bloom right now. Perhaps 'Little Darling'??! (just kidding!)

54-08-09: the first of the Fedtschenkoana hybrids blooms

This is the first of my 'Midnight Blue' X ('Orangeade' X R. fedtschenkoana) hybrids to flower. The pollen parent is a Kim Rupert hybrid given to me for study and breeding.

R. fedtschenkoana (HMF listing linked here) is a species native to parts of Asia and NW China. It is a prickly, upright species to 7 feet tall (give or take) with Linseed oil scented white blooms. About ten years ago, a lab did DNA sequencing of several of the early Damask cultivars and it was found, much to everyone's surprise, that R. fedtschenkoana played a role in the development of the Damask class. Roses such as R. damascena bifera are believed to be derived from (R. moschata X R. gallica) X R. fedtschenkoana. (Hikaru Iwata, Tsuneo Kato, and Susumu Ohno, 'Triparental Origin of Damask Roses', Gene, Vol. 259: Nos. 1-2 ( 2000 )

Read more: roses - Distribution and early development, The coming of the China roses, Recent developments, Materia Medica, Iliad, richardii) http://www.jrank.org/gardening/pages/1438/roses.html#ixzz0m8e6iKaI

The seedlings in the 54-08 group will be assessed for fertility, remontancy and disease resistance in the next few years. This first seedling has inherited the unusual Linseed Oil/herbal fragrance of its species grandparent, which I find intriguing. It has also inherited some degree of striping on the petals, which is curious, since there are no striped roses in its pedigree that I am aware of.

Hybrids like this may provide a completely new way of looking at the early development of the Damask class and new opportunities might be found when combining these species hybrids with more modern and more diverse parents. There are shockingly few species used in the development of modern garden roses (some estimate as few as seven or eight species are largely responsible for the creation of most of the roses we now grow!) and I feel that if anything truly new is to be created, integrating other species is essential now. I am particularly interested in the native North American roses like R. foliolosa and R. arkansana, to name but two.

Read more about some of Kim Rupert's other R. fedtschenkoana hybrids here.

R. fedtschenkoana hybrids.

54-08-03 = 'Midnight Blue' X ('Orangeade' X R. fedtschenkoana). The latter is a Kim Rupert hybrid given to me years ago for breeding purposes. See: LINK.

Some of you probably know that R. fedtschenkoana was identified about a decade ago as one of the species that helped found the Damask class. Since then, some hybridizers like Kim Rupert have incorporated the species into their breeding program in order to explore its genes as a potential source of new characteristics. Kim gave me a piece of his 'Orangeade' X R. fedtschenkoana hybrids several years ago and I have only recently started using it in my work. It took several years to start to flower, and because it clearly isn't ideally suited to my climate, it blooms only sparingly during its first cycle. And so, I rarely have pollen available at the right time.

However, in 2007 I managed to pollinate a few late blooms of 'Midnight Blue' with its pollen and about 14 seedlings resulted. Several of these grew so fast that they had to be moved into 5 gallon cans by June! I can see that hybrid vigor is something Kim's hybrid can bring into the mix. As expected, none of these flowered in their first year, and although "Kim's Fedtschenkoana" does rebloom, I don't expect my seedlings to be remontant. Often the remontancy genes from one class don't "play nice" with remontancy genes from another and what you get are mostly once bloomers. We shall see. To be honest, I don't expect anything but pinks, but with 'Orangeade' and 'Midnight Blue' in the mix, anything is possible.

The foliage is particularly attractive on these seedlings, most of them open with reddish tints and mature to a matte blue-green hue. The canes are matte as well, in brown and grey tones and fairly well armed with straight prickles. This year I will get them moved outdoors and see how they handle the typical diseases. (Kim's hybrid doesn't get any of the "big three" diseases, and with any luck, that might carry through to these seedlings)

The more I work with breeding roses, the more I find myself exploring non-traditional territory, often involving species and near-species hybrids. I think that if anything truly original and new is to be done with roses, it will surely come from the experimental breeding work of the dedicated "amateurs". (My friends, you know who you are!) The temptation to make crosses that will yield quick results is always there, but I say RESIST that temptation, and dare to strike your own trail. You just might end up creating a building block that future hybridizers might find invaluable in leading their own work forward. What better legacy could you want?!

R. fedtscenkoana

With the advances in genetic testing and DNA sequencing, it has become possible to perform tests on historic roses to determine the facts about their ancestry in ways we never could before. Case in point: the Damask roses. In 2000, an article was published in Gene magazine in which the researchers studied the genes of key Damask varieties to determine which species contributed to their creation.

From the article "Triparental origin of Damask roses" comes the following abstract:

"Damask roses are one group of old rose varieties and a key material in old European rose improvement in the 19th century. To clarify the origin of Damask roses, we selected four varieties as the oldest Damask varieties and examined the relationship between the Damask varieties and their putative ancestors at the molecular level. Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA analysis of the Damask varieties proved that they had an identical profile, indicating they were established from a common ancestor. They have never been allowed to reproduce sexually; their reproduction depends entirely on vegetative propagation. We identified three Rosa species, R. moschata, R. gallica and R. fedschenkoana, as parental species of the original hybridization that contributed to forming the four oldest Damask varieties by sequencing the internal transcribed spacer of ribosomal DNA. We also found that all the four oldest Damask varieties had chloroplasts derived only from R. moschata, as judged from psbA-trnH spacer sequences. This triparental origin of the four oldest Damask varieties can explain some morphological characteristics of the four oldest Damask varieties, like fruit shape, leaf color and the 'Moss' character."

Authors: Iwata, Kato, Ohno

Reference: Gene: 2000-Dec; vol 259 (issue 1-2) : pp 53-9

A few years ago Kim Rupert sent me cuttings of one of his R. fedtschenkoana hybrids, where 'Orangeade' was the seed parent. The plant illustrated above is that hybrid. This is, in a sense, a primitive Damask and may have value as a source of some of the same genes that make the ancient Damasks such valuable shrubs. I am currently using this Rupert hybrid in breeding and it appears to be fully fertile as a pollen parent, and although it has never set seeds for me, Kim tells me it does so in his desert climate. Since both seed and pollen parent are tetraploids, I am assuming this hybrid is as well and I will proceed on that assumption.

The Rupert hybrid is a tall arching shrub with bluish-green foliage and loads of small (1.25") white blooms, about 15 petals per bloom. It is a freely suckering plant and extremely healthy in my climate. The blooms don't always open properly, which I think is a response to our weather cycles in the early Summer. The blooms have a very odd Musky-soapy scent that many people would find unappealing.

I will soon post a photo of one of this year's seedlings derived from this R. fedtschenkoana hybrid.