How do you breed roses?
Question by Scheming Angel: How do you breed roses?
I’m willing to accept a few tongue-in-cheek responses about soft lighting and seductive music, but hopefully someone can tell me exactly how you combine different types of roses to make new breeds. Surely, it can’t be too complicated since plants are so much simpler than animals, biologically speaking.
What do you think? Answer below!
2 Responses to How do you breed roses?
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LMOA!! Damn it, you beat me to it. I was going to say something really witty about soft lights and music! I honestly don’t know how. If my mom were speaking to me, I would put you in touch with you. She has not spoken to me in over 2 years. Good luck Schemer.
Jeremy H
May 6, 2013 at 11:49 am
Very carefully, because you have to watch out for the stickers…
OK, here’s the straight stuff: Bees do it and so do humans. Here’s how (see reference below):
Breeding And Fragrance
(Also consult the American Rose Society: Fragrance)
Breeding
The thousands of different roses available today all trace their heritage back to the twelve dozen or so species roses, the ones that grow in the wild. The process of obtaining new roses is called hybridization. In this process, the pollen from one plant fertilizes the ovary of another. The plants from the resulting seeds will all be different.
Bees and other pollinating insects can cause this process to happen “naturally.” Man can also create hybrids and has raised it to a fine art in the last hundred-plus years, continually improving both flowers and plants. The overall procedure is lengthy – – from crossing to introduction to the public takes seven to ten years of painstaking work.
Before the cross is made, the hybridizer selects the parent plants, taking into account color, form, hardiness, disease resistance, foliage, and so forth. Next, the outer petals of the selected parents are removed, exposing the reproductive organs. All roses have both male and female parts. In the center of the flower are the female organs – – pistils and bear pollen- producing anthers.
To prevent self-pollination, the anthers are removed on the “mother” plants. The anthers on the “father” plant are harvested, labeled, and stored. About a day later, a sticky substance forms on the stigmas. The anthers release the dust- size pollen at about the same time, at which point it is brushed on the stigmas.
The rose is now labeled with information such as date and parentage. A bag is placed over the pollinated flower, protecting it from any further pollination. If fertilization occurred, the area beneath the reproductive organs begins to swell. This is the hip, or fruit, of the rose. It ripens in several months, is harvested, and the seeds removed.
The seeds are then cleaned and stratified, a process in which the seeds are placed in small containers of peat moss and stored at 400F. for six weeks, before being planted. Growing in a greenhouse, the first flowers may appear within seven to eight weeks after germination, giving an indication of this new plant’s potential.
A hybridizer may look over as many as a hundred thousand seedlings each year, with 99 percent discarded at some point during the first growing season. What makes this part of the job even harder than it sounds is that sometimes a promising-looking seedling will not do well when budded onto rootstock and grown outdoors. Conversely, an average-appearing plant may exhibit something special when bud-grafted and grown on.
The seedlings that pass muster are now ready for field testing and evaluation. More than just one plant is needed for this, so the original seedling is propagated. In order to have additional plants exactly like the parent, new ones are started by taking a cutting of a piece of stem that is the bud, or eye, found at the point where the leaf joins the stem. This is grafted onto a rootstock – – a rooted cutting of another rose.
Grafting is necessary because many of today’s complex hybrids root poorly or erratically on their own. Most garden roses are grown on a variety of multiflora rose. Buds are taken from dormant plants in late fall and grafted the following spring or summer. (For more information, see the American Rose Society: Propagation)
It is as budded, field-grown plants that these new roses really begin to “show off.” More are discarded and a few are budded in larger quantities for further testing. Only about a hundred make it to the second budding.
For at least another two to four years this process continues until only a handful remain. Some of the most promising are entered in the All-America Rose Selections judging. Four plants of each variety are sent to the 23 AARS test gardens around the country for two more years of observation. Once a company is ready to introduce a variety, large quantities of plants are budded and grown to marketable age – – a period of another two.
Long and arduous, the process of hybridization is now complete. The new variety – superior in any number of ways, be it color, fragrance, foliage, hardiness, disease resistance, or whatever – is now ready to bloom and grow beautifully in yards all over the country. Who knows? It may be the best seller, the one topping PEACE with over 20 million plants sold since 1945 and nearly every home rose garden having one!
Fragrance
One rose characteristic which most people expect is fragrance. Watch someone walk by roses in full bloom. First, there’ll be an exclamation over color or beauty, but, inevitably, the head will bend in expectation of that special scent we’ve come to expect.
Many years ago Alice Morse Earle wrote, “The fragrance of the sweetest rose is beyond an other flower scent,
Don
May 6, 2013 at 12:37 pm