Showing posts with label Growing roses from seed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Growing roses from seed. Show all posts

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Growing Your Own

Connie, of Hartwood Roses, recently published a blog about growing roses from seed, illustrating a particularly beautiful soft yellow rose seedling that she grew and continues to grow.  An open-pollinated seedling from a neighbor's rose hips, she's so impressed by its disease resistant foliage and non-fading color that she is planning to evaluate it for commercial introduction by her nursery.

In honor and imitation of Connie's post, I'll show you a rose that I grew from seed several years ago and continue to grow.  This semi-double pink rose, from an open-pollinated hip of Carefree Beauty, keeps a place in my garden because of the delicate and perfect pink shadings of the bloom.  It grows about 3 feet tall, not as vigorously as Carefree Beauty, but it does retain that blackspot-free foliage of its mother.  This rose is remonant, repeating sparsely about 3 times a year, moderately scented, and seems to be fully hardy in Zone 5B without protection.  I'm not fooling myself that it is worthy of commercial introduction, but at the same time, I also can't scrub it out of my garden.  That delicate shell-pink is just too stunning to wipe from the earth now. 

I don't think there's a rose-grower out there who hasn't tried, once or twice or three times, to grow a new rose of their own from the hips that proliferate throughout their gardens.  I've obviously fallen into the trap myself and, inspired by Connie, I intend to again.  The biggest issue for me has been the transition from chilling the rose hips to starting them indoors in the winter.  I know about stratifying the seed, as Connie details in another blog, but after that I have a poor germination rate and an even poorer rate of keeping them alive indoors until springtime. 

But, I have a long-standing desire to get some seedlings out of 'Rugelda', a yellow-red Rugosa that I worship, and maybe some of the other Buck roses such as 'Prairie Harvest'.   If the bumblebees do their job, somewhere out there might be the genes of a buttery-yellow rose of my very own.

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