I sat in the audience during the discussions of the rose breeder’s panel as part of the lecture programme of
ROSAFRICA 2012. From the replies by the attending breeders of new roses to the question of how they saw the future of the roses, I thought that they did not go far enough in their thinking or visions.
It is by now accepted that new releases of rose varieties need to be fairly resistant to diseases, mostly of course, to the dreaded black spot. ‘Flower Carpet’ was the rage twenty years ago. Huge quantities were sold worldwide, including in South Africa. As a groundcover rose in our climate it grows too vigorous and spreading, resulting in a much reduced flowering ability. In cold climate countries it is still very popular, as well as its colour variations. In South Africa, Ludwig’s Roses received new varieties with similar qualities from Messrs Kordes in Germany and released a group of Sunsation (R) and Profusion(R) roses, that included ‘Deloitte&Touche’. These, as well as ‘Flower Carpet’, have the rose ‘Immensee’, also known as ‘Grouse’, in their genetics. They are still widely planted and have become great favourites with landscapers for mass plantings, but also for private gardens.
At about the same time the amateur rose breeders Scrivens in the UK created an incredibly healthy little yellow rose and named it ‘Baby Love’. Meilland of France was also busy and came up with the Meillandina (R) group. Poulsen Roses were always known for tough, healthy roses from the days of the oldest Polyanthas. A variety from them that stood out at South African rose trials was a rose that Ludwig’s Roses released as ‘My Granny’. In the USA the amateur breeder Radler came up with an amazingly healthy single flowering rose that became famous under the name ‘Knock Out’. It is planted by the millions in the USA, but the five petalled blooms fold up too quickly in our dry heat (although it is doing well in the high humidity regions of coastal KZN).
All these varieties quoted above had a natural resistance to black spot infection. They flower very well, but usually with insipid small, few petalled blooms.
Roses are expected to be romantic, but then what does romance really mean?
Wikipedia tells us that romance has its origin in medieval tales written in a Romance language – not in Latin. The Romance language is a vernacular language descended from Latin for the whole group including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and others. The idea of Romance started with prose written in the 16th and 17th centuries with scenes and incidents remote from every day life suggesting tales of strangeness, moving nature of imaginative characters or qualities of exaggeration and picturesque falsehood. Obviously the English and Germanic poets and writers took their cue from this and became Romancers.
Being romantic means romance, visionary, fantastic, unpractical, quixotic, dreamy, passion, remoteness from experience, irregular beauty, grandeur, be adventurous, or to rhapsodize, enthuse, indulge in emotions.
If one looks at this the romance of roses is not found in the regular single five-petalled blooms but rather in the irregular beauty of centifolia, damask or gallica roses. These were eventually topped by the creations of the formal, upright growing bushes producing long, straight stems with high pointed regal buds and blooms in the latter half of the 19th century. For the next century rose breeders concentrated on creating more Hybrid Tea varieties as they became known. New bloom shapes, petal hardiness, fragrance in the most amazing colour blends and combinations were aimed at satisfying the
emotional, romantic need of people – the unpractical, quixotic, dreamy passion.
The British rose grower David Austin was involved in refurbishing old rose gardens with old varieties and realised the romantic value of many of the old flower and plant shapes that had been neglected for so long, mostly, because they do not re-bloom after their first early summer flush. He started his own hybridising programme with the aim of producing free and repeat flowering shrubs, bushes and climbing roses with full, large blooms of ’qualities of exaggerations’. They became known as David Austin’s English Roses and a craze started worldwide to grow these romantic roses in gardens. The stiff, upright growing Hybrid Tea roses had become stereotyped and a garden needed to be loosened up with the shrubby, adventurous growth habit of these varieties.
Now let’s go back to the practical side of rose growing. The upright growing Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses are usually planted close together in beds and there is limited sunlight falling onto the lower leaves being shaded from the upper portion of the bush and the close neighbours. Limited leaf surface exposed to the sun results in limited root strength and activity. In addition these roses are pruned down every winter, and worst of all the best leaves are cut off when picking blooms for the home. Such roses require frequent care, which is not given in our present circumstances of a hectic lifestyle.
The original roses that have developed 30 million years ago and many of the natural hybrids have survived because of their shrubby broad growth habit and the subsequent ability of deep reaching roots, not necessarily due to disease resistance.
The ‘Flower Carpet’, Sunsation(R), Meillandina (R), ‘Knock Out’ and many of the David Austin Roses have a broad, somewhat prostrate growth habit, with lots of leaves exposed to sunlight. In addition such growth habit automatically provides shade onto the soil, more earthworm and microbe activity and prevents compaction of the soil due to us not being able to walk too close around the centre of the bush.
All this information shows that the future roses have to have a rather shrubby informal growth in different heights with the ability to produce on top of such shrubs straight, upright stems in an endless profusion, each bearing a perfect sharply pointed, fragrant exhibition shaped bloom in every colour. Obviously, the leaves of such a rose need to be hardy and disease-resistant.
I think every rose breeder in the world included ‘Baby Love’, ‘Knock Out’ and ‘Flower Carpet’ in his cross-pollinating programme and this resulted in vast improvement already.
We do have the first of such a rose listed in our catalogue. It is ‘Arctic Ice’ var. DELgramu also known as ‘La Rose de Molinard’, a creation of Arnaud Delbard of France. There are more such varieties to come.
Another option are the Super Hybrid Teas, of which several can be found amongst our Spire Roses (R). Most of these are our selections from creations by the German rose breeding house Kordes. These roses have a powerful upright growth habit reaching to at least 2m in height producing very long-stemmed perfectly shaped picking
roses. By standing so very proud and tall with such long stems, even by cutting an 80 cm long stemmed bloom, the actual 1.5 m long stem would only be cut back halfway, with lots of good leaves to remain. ‘Moonlit Spire’ is my personal favourite of the group. Of course this tall growing group is excellent as climbing replacements, where no training, espaliering and tying is required.
Harkness of England gave us ‘Easy Does It’, which is a small flowering hybrid tea, performing like a Floribunda that is excellent as a bedding rose. With its incredible black spot resistance it keeps its leaves intact and this again maintains root stimulation and continual flowering. Our new, highly scented ‘Lemonessence’ is the next generation.
From Kordes we released ‘Winter Sun’, a light yellow hybrid tea that just keeps on producing pickable hybrid tea blooms. It is a top performer in the difficult weather for rose growing in Hillcrest, KZN. The buff coloured
‘Clocolan’ from Kordes too is an incredible performer with its large full blooms and its leaf-covered, neat, shrubby underframe.
Most of these are actual the in-between steps of the perfect rose we are waiting for and which is said will never materialise.
It is now almost 10 years after the above was published. Many novel varieties were named and released and made their mark already.
A breeder or evaluator of trial roses like me is looking and evaluating roses almost daily, forever thinking what could improve the already perfect rose. Of course perfection has a different expectation to individuals as it entails colour, shape of blooms, scent, growth habit and flowering ability. The most popular and best-selling variety is ‘Iceberg’. Next in line would be ‘Double Delight’ and ‘Just Joey’. Whereas ‘Iceberg’ has blooms of a clean white that can be seen from afar, they are open in clusters and the bushes are never without blooms for most of the year. Both ‘Double Delight’ and ‘Just Joey’ have large, attractively shaped blooms exuding a strong fragrance. The bushes are not amongst the most vigorous nor healthy varieties.
The aim is obvious to create strong, vigorous, disease-resistant plants of all types of roses bearing such shapely blooms in a non-stop floriferousness. For some time already our aim is to create and select varieties that would fall in-between the classical Hybrid Teas and the Floribundas. It means that the flowers would still be of classical exhibition shape, but smaller and mostly in small clusters. The stems would be upright and firm and the bush would be well foliated. It is also important that they clean themselves, meaning the petals drop off cleanly and that they are quick in repeat-flowering without the need to deadhead and a lot of grooming.
In order to achieve this we selected female varies that had many of these features and pollinated their blooms with the pollen from such popular hybrid teas as ‘Double Delight’, ‘Just Joey’, ‘Tanned Beauty’, ‘Perfumery’, ‘Peach Melba’ etc. Those that were selected and named are starting to make their mark.
In selecting the parentages for new varieties it is not just to use two reds or pinks etc, but rather go into the ancestry of a variety which is already earmarked as a good parent.
When young Sam McGredy IV took over the running of the age old company that created varieties for over a hundred years, he was asked by a journalist how he decides on the parentages of creating new roses. His answer was to study Modern Roses. I have Modern Roses XI next to me. It is issued by the American Rose Society. It is listing some 25 000 rose varieties with descriptions of type and colour, the breeder and parentage if known.
In 1991 one of Sam’s creation was ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. It is a good rose that won several trial ground awards. I noticed that other breeders soon used this variety as a parent, with good results. ‘Deloitte & Touche’ is one of them. I then checked out the ancestry of ‘Singin in the Rain’ over five generations. I found ‘Sexy Rexy’, ‘Pot O’ Gold’, ‘Sea Spray’, ‘Träumerei’, ‘Zorina’, ‘Red Gold’, ‘Spartan’, twice ‘New Penny’, twice ‘Geranium Red’, 3 times ‘Independence’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Karl Herbst’, ‘Any Time’, ‘Moana’, ‘Pinocchio’. I have grown many of these varieties over the past 60 years and know their qualities. We all know from our own children, grandchildren that they have certain little features, be it hair, nose, ear or movements that are reminiscent of one of the ancestors be it from mother’s or father’s side. With rosebreeding it is the same, with the difference that one makes a hundred or more “children” and then checks out those that have one or more of the desired characteristics and throws the other on the compost heap. The other decision is, should such a desired rose be used as a male or female, often actually as both.
Another variety that is high on my list for cross-pollinating is ‘Peach Melba’. The parents include ‘Kordes Perfecta’ for the stiff petals, ‘Duftwolke’ for the colouring and scent and also ‘Zorina’ for free and quick repeat-flowering. But it is susceptible to powdery mildew, an inheritance of ‘Super Star’.
Matching the two has already brought us some most interesting new varieties such as ‘My Darling’, ‘Namaqualand’ and ‘Sundowner’, with our ‘Pretty Yende’ being the perfect rose. ‘Saints Jubilee’ we regard as an improvement of ‘Double Delight’ being a match of ‘Sheila’s Perfume’ and ‘Double Delight’. An unexpected result of various matches is ‘The Yellow’, of which I am very proud.
Another breeding of interesting new varieties is by having used ‘Arctic Ice’ and ‘Winter Sun’ and several other varieties and this gave us our group of STAMINA Roses, a compact broad growth habit with robust foliage producing fully petalled, romantic blooms. ‘Turning Point’ and ‘Fordyce’ are the most prominent ones.
Our efforts in creating a strongly scented “black” rose is likely years away.
