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Your native species roses: reblooming, or not?

ffff
9 years ago

I'm pondering some possible breeding ideas, and have a question.

Do you have rebloom in a native species rose, or did you expect rebloom in one and not get it?

I'm trying to sort out which reblooming American species might be like musks or banksias, which rebloom in Z9 but probably don't in Z7, and those which have some rebloom in a wider range of climates.

Thanks for whatever you can tell me!

Comments (6)

  • Kippy
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Not sure if it helps but, the neighbors LARGE old Fortuniana has blooms, the Cherokee rose just down the rose has blooms, the pink species? rose planted by the new condos have hips and blooms.

  • trospero
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I have a R. arkansana grown from seed that flowers in 3 or 4 flushes per growing season; the final one usually in early October. In breeding, this trait vanishes when crossed with modern roses of any kind. I never did find a mate for it that passed on this reblooming trait. It would likely require several generations of careful selection, but I gave up breeding before I could pursue that idea.

  • roseseek
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    The Sacramento Cemetery selection of Californica gave sparse bloom here (Zone 10) then stopped cold. Minutifolia flowered until about six weeks ago. Puzzlement, my potential Stellata-Fedtschenkoana hybrid, flowered until about a month ago when the weather got REALLY hot and dry. Kim

  • Tessiess, SoCal Inland, 9b, 1272' elev
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Rosa californica 'First Dawn' has excellent rebloom. It is blooming now. Rosa californica 'Los Berros' rarely has any rebloom, and if so only a few flowers. I had one other Rosa californica selection but it was a casualty of my biggest dog. Rancho Santa Ana Botanic garden near me has multiple selections of Rosa californica--(from various counties) and their rebloom varies considerably. My Rosa minutifolias have been dormant in the heat and not blooming. We just had rain so they may bloom soon. None of my other CA native roses has shown any rebloom. However I just bought Schoener's Nutkana, the hp-cross, yesterday from my local botanic garden. It's only a baby in a 1 gallon pot, so I don't know when it will have its first flower. The big, adult plants in the botanic garden have fairly good rebloom throughout the year.

    Some of my other species roses/species crosses that aren't CA natives rebloom (even some that aren't supposed to have any). R. fedtschenkoana repeats here and both R. borissovae and William's Double Yellow (blooming since September) repeated for the only time this year. R. borissovae is pretty much an unknown commodity, so I don't have a good idea what is normal for this rose. William's Double Yellow really shouldn't be blooming more than once!

    Melissa

  • Tessiess, SoCal Inland, 9b, 1272' elev
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Got another surprise today walking through the garden. R. borissovae is blooming. Again. What a neat little rose! Flowers have a sweet scent overlayed with linseed oil.

    Melissa

  • ffff
    Original Author
    9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Trospero:
    "I have a R. arkansana grown from seed that flowers in 3 or 4 flushes per growing season; the final one usually in early October. In breeding, this trait vanishes when crossed with modern roses of any kind. I never did find a mate for it that passed on this reblooming trait. It would likely require several generations of careful selection, but I gave up breeding before I could pursue that idea."

    My readings have led me to the conclusion that one can't get juvenile rebloom out of a native without multiple generations, as you say, and that if one wants to exceed 50% native (and thus have a good shot at rose rosette resistance, among other things), it would balloon into a huge project. I was thinking about it differently. Rather than trying to mix some native into garden roses, I was wondering how good of a garden rose could be made out of natives. Though your White Rabbit arkansana (or my reblooming californica or palustris) would be incompatible with chinensis rebloom, they might not be with each others', or with that of other sorts of extended bloomers and adult rebloomers (spithamea, pomifera/borissovae, damascena, musk, banksia, etc.) Palustris x virginiana blooms twice, as does setigera x gallica, if Baltimore Belle's ancestry is to be believed, so it doesn't seem like an impossible goal.

    Basically I'm just chewing on the problem of how to breed out the suckering without losing what they already have going for them, including rebloom. Your arkansana might not be too bad that way, but californica can eat a yard pretty quickly. I could just graft native rebloomers onto setigera rootstock and be done with it -- I admit I have some setigera seeds in the fridge, and am considering trying it -- but that seems more like a workaround than an ideal solution. The non-chinensis rebloom/extended bloom mechanisms are just so poorly explored it's hard to guess what breeding approach might solve the suckering without killing the blooming season.

    In a way, it's similar to the question I face using Nightmoss as breeding stock. Neither of its parents rebloom, and it doesn't rebloom, but a seedling of it does, and a cross of it with a flush-blooming found rose does. Those two comprise all of its known progeny. Nuits de Young and Tuscany Superb have produced one reblooming offspring each, but their single blooming progeny are far more common. So what's lurking in Nightmoss, is it damascena rebloom, chinensis rebloom, the rare but undeniable gallica rebloom? Two or more of the above?

    Mama Luymans (Gruss an Teplitz x Aimable Rouge) reblooms, though Aimable Rouge doesn't look chinensis, and seems too old to contain any. Baltimore Belle, Stanwell Perpetual, Paula Vapelle, and a number of other chinensis-free rebloomers, shouldn't. If the Portland Rose is really an F1 of gallica x damask, it shouldn't. For that matter, musk x gallica shouldn't, nor should its offspring R. damascena. More to the point, my palustris has stipules that are a little wide for the species, and its prickles aren't too hooked, but I still have no clue why it's in bloom in middle of November.

    I guess there's nothing more that I can do, than to place my bets on certain combinations, and see what happens. Like, if I tried Souvenir de Brod x Nightmoss, I suspect I might get some rebloomers in the batch, but I couldn't tell you what kind(s) of rebloom it would be, why it had it/them, or how to extend the result to other crosses. Maybe that's as good as it gets when you're out of the chinensis mainstream.