I want to cross this rose ‘Crépuscule’ with this rose, ‘Arethusa’ and plan to this summer, after checking on my rose seeds in the fridge today I know it’s gotta be done.

They are tea-noisette and china hybrids from the early 20th century, both introduced in a two year span between 1903 and 1904 and both are certainly representative of what was in fashion at the time. A lot of the roses from that era are really my style. Lots of yolky buffs, apricot, yellow and pink.

‘Crépuscule’ is the tea-noisette, something of a climber with apricot-buff colored flowers, while ‘Arethusa’ (named after the fountain and its namesake nymph) is a short, bushy buff-pink hybrid-china, starting off apricot and going through a color shift to more of a pastel pink as it ages. Most china roses come in shades of deep scarlet, medium reds and deep rose-pinks so ‘Arethusa’ is a bit atypical of its class due to it’s coloring, which no doubt was and still is its novelty.

Both plants due to their china and tea blood are not terribly cold hardy, but ‘Crépuscule’ is a very healthy plant with shiny peach-leaf like leaves that have a distinct droop, while ‘Arethusa’ while not as healthy foliar wise has compact size on its side and a bit more hardiness. Both are known to be very fertile,  ‘Crépuscule’ while it forms hips is said to be more useful as a pollen parent and I’ve been told by a professional rose-breeder to put its pollen on everything, as it often breeds good yellows and other apricot buffs like itself. ‘Arethusa’ is a good seed parent with good germination rates. I applied pollen from an electric (and I mean electric )  hot pink shrub rose ‘Lynnie’ onto ‘Arethusa’ which took and formed a hip in late summer, which I harvested. Checking on the seeds from that hip in the fridge today I saw I had good germination and just planted them up in a tray to sprout. That for me attested that ‘Arethusa’ is easy to work with.

The goal of the cross would be something of an in-between both plants; to tame ‘Crépuscule’s sprawling and rambling ways and have a more mounding smaller shrub as opposed to the porch swallowing mass it can become. Essentially put it’s coloring and foliage onto ‘Arethusa’ shrub size and habit and I’m good to go.

‘Arethusa’ introduced 1903 photo courtesy of angelgardens.com. Will have my own pictures of ‘Arethusa’ next year.

Next summer I will try to do some more first direct cross breeding between rose cultivars. This year I may have made my first successful cross when putting either pollen from ‘Stanwell Perpetual’ that I received in the mail from a fellow rose hybridizer, or ‘Plaisanterie’ pollen, as I did pluck quite a few flowers of the latter and dusted the pollen on flowers of my rugosa ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’.’Roseraie de l’Häy’ cannot self fertilize itself, being from the rugosa family, which needs pollen from either another seperate clone or bush of rugosa or some other rose in order to produce hips, or the rose’s fruit. If you ever see rugosa roses on the beach up in Massachusetts, you’ve seen rose hips.  I had, I think around fifteen on ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ which is an astounding amount of hips for a plant, whom, among the rugosa family, does not often set hips. It just doesn’t accept pollen as readily. Thus many have assumed that ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ is sterile. Not so. She must have liked something. While most hips that formed were the size of about a cherry, one of the hips that formed was about the size of a crab apple, and around the area in which I remember diliberately putting pollen of either the two above roses, ‘Stanwell Perpetual’ and ‘Plaisanterie’. It is more likely that the cross that was more sucessful if it indeed was my application of pollen that made it set fruit, is ‘Plaisanterie’ because both it and ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ are diploid in chromosome counts. ‘Stanwell Perpetual’ is a tetraploid, which while can breed with diploids, it’s more difficult to do so than diploid on diploid. I should be getting seedlings from those hips in the next few weeks to upcoming months. I’m extremely excited as ‘Plaisanterie’ is one of my favorite roses so far and it will be curious to see if the seeds from those hips were indeed ‘Plaisanterie’ crosses.

The above picture is that of the china rose, ‘Arethusa’, a small apricot/yellow blend china rose that I’ve profiled on here before. I find it very interesting to me and I suspect it will be used heavily in my breeding program. Mine is young, about a year old, but despite it’s small size, being still under a foot in size, it still produced quite a few flowers this summer and fall of remarkable quality for such a small and immature plant, and even set a hip. It seems healthy, with shiny foliage. Very desirable as the full size height is not terribly tall either, which makes it good for landscaping. 

My goal in rose breeding is to ultimately see if I can produce a disease resistant, free-flowering, and attractive shrub that can be marketed successfully for use in landscaping with perhaps added bonus of additional seasonal interest, scent, and wildlife use. Not to say I won’t create or might make some beautiful things in the meantime that may not prove to be marketable but I’d love them just the same. It’s not so much for the prospect of money, it would be nice but I would rather find some gems I myself appreciate and be proud of all hard work and artistry of the combinations used in getting the result. After all, half of it is all the roses work!

For crossing classification, one considers the first listed cultivar as the female parent or the parent that is used produce the hip, followed by an ‘x’ and then the subsequent cultivar is the “male” parent of the cross, or the rose that donated it’s pollen. You can also, using the same cultivars together as your original pair, can reverse their roles, using the original “mother” plant cultivar’s pollen and the original “father” as the producer of the hip. It doesn’t always work as some plants are specifically more pollen fertile than being better for hip production, but with crosses that can be done in such manner it is sometimes wise to do as it brings out different genetic traits between the two parents and is good to see which method of breeding produces seedlings that are more desirable, as some plants depending how they’re crossed will favor one parent over the other.

One of my initial goals is to try and “tame” ‘Plaisanterie’, a monster vigorous china-hybrid musk bred from two very vigorous roses that get big in their own right; the color changing “Butterfly Rose”  china hybrid ‘Mutabilis, and the white sire to the hybrid-musk family of semi-climbers and weeping shrubs, ‘Trier’. Thus it really wants to climb and mound like its parents, bit like an octopus, and I really want to control that but still keep ‘Plaisanterie’s visual merits it inherited from ‘Mutabilis’. Thus the goal is to get a seedling that is much tidier - a 2’ to 4’ shrub by 3’ to 4’. Using smaller shrubs like ‘Arethusa’, ‘Prairie Joy’ and ‘Softee’ to help produce a possible dwarf seedling may be a way to go about doing this. Some crosses I may try to make in 2011 if I can learn to get up at dawn and do emasculation of blooms to get ready for the cross, otherwise I’d just do what bees do, and kind of smudge pollen with my finger:

‘Arethusa’ x ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’

‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ x ‘Arethusa’

‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ x ‘Crepuscule’

‘Prairie Joy’ x ‘Arethusa’

‘Arethusa’ x ‘Prairie Joy’

‘Prairie Joy’ x ‘Crepuscule’

‘Prairie Joy’ x ‘Plaisanterie’

‘Softee’ x ‘Plaisanterie’

‘Plaisanterie’ x ‘Softee’

‘Arethusa’ x ‘Veilchenblau’ 

‘Veilchenblau’ x ‘Arethusa’

‘Arethusa’ x ‘Crepuscule’

‘Arethusa’ x ‘Plaisanterie’

‘Plaisanterie’ x ‘Arethusa’

‘Auguste Gervais’ x ‘Arethusa’

‘Tuscany Superb’ x ‘Hazeldean’

‘Hazeldean’ x ‘Tuscany Superb’

‘James Mason’ x ‘Hazeldean’

‘Hazeldean’ x ‘James Mason’

‘Duchesse de Montebello’ x ‘Hazeldean’

‘Hazeldean’ x ‘Henri Martin’

‘Henri Martin’ x ‘Hazeldean’

‘Duchesse de Montebello’ x ‘Henri Martin’

R.foliolosa is a dwarf native species that seldom gets larger than two feet tall.It has vibrant autumn foliage coloring. r.palustris scandens is a very pretty subspecies or clone of the native swamp rose, r.palustris which has unlike other clones of r.palustris, this one blooms in flushes of pretty magenta-pink that repeat as opposed to blooming only once in early summer. Both are nearly thornless and  have small willow-like leaves; neither appear very rose-like. In fact, r.paustris scandens has such pretty red smooth stems that it’s winter interest is incredible.

r.virginiana is a different native in that it is a much more common east coast native, a larger shrub with more vicious thorns and “rose-like” attributes, and unlike r.foliolosa and r.palustris, it is a tetraploid, whereas the two former are diploids. This opens a bit of a different range to which r.virginiana could be more easily crossed with, as it means it can be crossed with the tetraploid gallicas and other old European roses and modern shrubs, which because of diverse backgrounds and hundreds of years of breeding, are also mostly tetraploid. It is said that r.virginiana “mixes” well with other shrubs in allowing modern colors and influence to show better in its seedlings compared to other species whose influence can sometimes dominate a seedling entirely, almost hiding all modern influence from the cross. r.carolina supposedly does this as well, though I currently don’t grow it, I will try to obtain it this year as well.

r. foliolosa x ‘Plaisanterie’

r. foliolosa x r. palustris scandens

r. foliolosa x ‘Roseraie de l’Häy’

‘Roseraie de l’Häy’ x r. foliolosa

‘Plaisanterie’ x r.palustris scandens

‘Arethusa’ x r.palustris scandens

r.palustris scandens x ‘Plasanterie’

r.palustris scandens x ‘Arethusa’

r. virginiana x ‘Tuscany Superb’

‘Tuscany Superb’ x r. virginiana

‘Henri Martin’ x r. virginiana

r.virginiana x ‘Henri Martin’

Will post more cross ideas another time, stay tuned for part II.