Viewing post #1069164 by RoseBlush1

sunnyvalley said:Neal, your roses are looking good. I haven’t seen much winter damage on the roses I don’t protect either – it has been exceptionally mild so far. The ones where I have pushed the zone a bit are still mounded and covered so it’s hard to tell. Looks like I won’t be opening them up too soon either, winter is back! It snowed last week with more forecast for this week.

Margie – good luck with your seeds!

Philip – agreed, it is a long process but an extremely rewarding one. I am by no means an expert and only started doing my own crosses about five years ago. The chance of creating something totally unique fascinates me! Each seed, even from the same hip, is different. Granted, a lot of the seedlings are similar. When I first started I kept every single one of them. As you can imagine, my pot ghetto became rather large. These days I limit the number of seeds that I sow to about 300 and a lot of them land up on the compost but it is the quest for that special rose that drives me.

These 6 seedlings are all from the same cross and show how different the results can be.

Thanks for the photos SV. They reminded me of something Jack Harkness wrote in one of his books published back around 1975. (My rose mentor made me do a LOT of reading and Jack's books were part of my assigned reading.)

Jack was writing about breeders withholding lineage information about the crosses they used to keep other breeders from copying their work. He said something like it was possible for one cross to have more than 250 million outcomes, so even if the lineage was disclosed, the likelihood of another breeder getting the same rose from the same cross was almost nonexistent. He went on to say, it took the breeder's eye to know which seedlings to save and carry forward and which seedlings to cull.

Your photos certainly prove his point. Good luck with your hybridizing.