My assistant

"These flats are ready for dumping, boss!!!"

0-47-19 tidied up and ready to go.

This is the Moore Rambler 0-47-19, a typical Wichurana Rambler in most every way. I keep several plants of it on the farm, because you never know when a Gopher or other force of nature might decide to destroy a plant. Backups are as meaningful in an archive of plants as they are with your hard drive!
Twas a pleasant afternoon yesterday and so I spent a pleasant hour in greenhouse 3 tidying up this 0-47-19, getting the canes all wound together into orderly fashion, so they'd be accessible for pollination in May.

A public service announcement.

Downy Mildew. If you have ever had to deal with it in your greenhouse (or worse, your garden) you will be clenching your teeth in dread right now. If you are not familiar with it, count your blessings. It would be wise to do a bit of reading, though, just so you know what you are dealing with should you ever have it happen to you.

Read on.

Thanks to the Marin Rose Society for publishing this resource.

Un-named Gallica seedling, circa 1999.

This has been sitting in my archive of seedlings from over a decade ago, loved but not shared. Every once in a while I look at it long and hard and think "This thing is so beautiful....but totally redundant; an anachronism."

And so, it remains in my garden, undistributed. As any hybridizer will tell you, you end up accumulating an array of seedlings that fall into the redundant category; lovely but commercially irrelevant. I'm never really sure what to do with these creatures. Do I just propagate a few and share them with the few "collectors" who would appreciate them, letting them out un-named? I still don't know the answer to that one. What to do, what to do....

Penny-trad: my "Little Darling"

I've mentioned this plant in previous posts (See: 77-07-12) but haven't written about it specifically in a post of its own, so.....

Years ago I was given an un-named seedling by my friend Duane Coyier, a retired plant pathologist. It was a self-seedling of 'Poker Chip' that Duane liked and he was of the opinion that it might have merit as a breeder. (It was eventually registered officially as 'Penny Ante', see: http://www.helpmefind.com/gardening/l.php?l=2.38197) Needless to say, I put it to work in my breeding program, not so much because I thought it had particular merit, but because I had it, and I was willing to give any rose that made seed readily a chance. (You tend to use whatever you have available to you at any given time)

'Penny Ante' presents nicely shaped HT style miniature blooms in a rich yellow tinted with red. Blooms open very fast and do fade, but otherwise are quite pretty for the type. The plant is very upright and stiff and rather lacking in balance of architecture, in my opinion, a characteristic it tends to pass on a bit too easily. Still, it has turned out to be a very useful breeding plant and has some very useful traits: it blooms in truly massive clusters, up to 40 blooms on a spike, which it often passes on to offspring. It also has excellent vigor and reblooms much better than its English parent.

Ralph Moore often told me he thought the miniatures had the ability to pass on some valuable properties to future generations, including abundance/frequency of bloom. I can see now just how right he was. Although it doesn't have stellar disease resistance, "Penny-Trad" has a track record of breeding some highly disease-free seedlings, when mated with the right thing.

You just never know where your best breeders are going to come from.

The little stuff: 81-02-01

81-02-01: 'Oakington Ruby' X 'Little Chief', 2002. Nicknamed "Priscilla Plumbbob".

It is undeniable that Ralph Moore's work heavily influenced my own vision of rose breeding in the early 2000s. At times I even sought to mirror some of his own efforts, if for no other reason than to simply see first hand what kind of variations could be had with such crosses. It is worth remembering that when a hybridizer releases a selection into commerce, that we, the consumers, are seeing only one plant the breeder considered to be the best of the lot. The rest of the seedlings tell a much bigger story: perhaps the selected one was the only seedling of merit in a sea of junk. Or perhaps there were dozens of runners up that were so, so close to ideal that many were considered for commerce. Or maybe germination was terrible and there were only five seedlings to evaluate at all! You never know. I've seen all of these scenarios in my own work.

Back to the rose in the photo. I shared Ralph's fascination for tiny roses, and was especially fond of one of the key contributors to modern miniature breeding: 'Oakington Ruby'. It can be a great little shrub, and is totally China-like in all its aspects, except its small stature and tiny plant parts. I played with it a bit years ago, crossing it with other minis mostly, just to see what I would get. 81-02-01 was one such cross: 'Oakington Ruby' X 'Little Chief', the latter being born out of a curious pedigree involving a R. multibracteata hybrid, R. wichurana, 'Slater's Crimson China', and "Rouletii". As a breeder, 'Little Chief' has a reputation for being finicky as a seed parent but very generous as a pollen parent. I've used it on things like R. foliolosa and gotten some striking results. In the case of 81-02-01, seedlings were a lot more typical of this kind of breeding: lots of very small plants in pinks and reddish hues, well-branched, largely unremarkable. (I did release one as a kind of "collectors item" rose, named 'Oui'. Click here to view it on HMF)

This cute little pink number is one of my favorites of the lot, but has not been introduced into commerce, as I regard it as a bit of an anachronism and hardly something a lot of people are going to be interested in. It is 8 years old now and still happily occupies a 5 gallon pot, and has not exceeded 15" tall and about as wide. It is intermediate in style between the two parents and fairly thorny. I presents its bloom in clusters spread attractively across its canopy of dense, bright green growth and is in bloom on and off all season. The candy pink blooms are about an inch across, very double and have an unusual sweet candy-like fragrance, similar to the scent of certain China cultivars. It sets seed on occasion, although I have never tried to germinate them. Maybe I will sow a few this year, just out of curiosity.

Listing on HMF