The BIG rose

A couple of posts back (see "A Seattle garden"), I highlighted the great 'Queen Elizabeth' rose, and its willingness to grow rather big.  That was just what I needed to produce some vigorous rose seedlings to populate my new garden in Salem, Oregon.  I wasn't disappointed.   To circumvent the dilution of the gene pool, I just let my purchased 'Queen Elizabeth' roses open pollinate, which most likely meant self pollinate.  I also had another motive for this.  With self pollination, I would basically re-shuffle the gene pool and maybe get a better idea wherefrom 'Queen Elizabeth' came.  Rose "bibles" say that its parents were 'Charlotte Armstrong' (seed) and 'Floradora' (pollen).  In turn, the parents of  'Charlotte Armstrong'   were 'Soeur Therese' (seed) and 'Crimson Glory' (pollen), whereas the parents of 'Floradora' were 'Baby Chateau' (seed) and Rosa roxburghii (pollen).  Pictures of all of these roses can be seen on Google Images.  There's not a BIG rose in that bunch, except for R. roxburghii.  But what I wanted to know was this: was it R. roxburghii plena (the rose with LOTS of petals), or was it R. roxburghii normalis (described as having 4 to 8 petals); again, both can be seen on Google Images.  Rose literature is unclear about which roxburghii Mathias Tantau, the German hybridizer, used to pollinate 'Baby Chateau' when he bred 'Floradora'.

My guess is that it was R. roxburghii normalis.  My seedlings from 'Queen Elizabeth' are showing quite a few "singles", namely rose plants having blooms of 5 petals or so.  Below, I'll show you some of my seedlings at the time they opened their first bloom.  This coming Summer, I'll take some photos of the grown-up plants, so stay tuned.  Click on the photos to enlarge them.  Also, note that it usually doesn't take very long for a rose seedling to show you its first bloom.                                                                 

Update of May 28, 2012:   The grown-up rose bushes are starting to bloom -- to see them, click on the "Queen Elizabeth seedlings" tab at the top of this blog.

Seedling born 3/04/2009, first bloom 5/31/2009

Seedling born 4/04/2009, first bloom 6/10/2009

Seedling born 3/23/2009, first bloom 7/05/2009

                           

Switching gears, here now is an example of a full blossomed seedling from 'Queen Elizabeth': 

Seedling born 3/26/2009, first bloom 6/10/2009

And here is the same rose just two years later (June 26, 2011), standing as tall as I am -- 5½ feet !

Note the 'Queen Elizabeth' bloom in the foreground.

  

This paragraph is for SERIOUS ROSE DETECTIVES:  for many years, it was thought that Mathias Tantau had used Rosa multibracteata as the pollen parent when he hybridized 'Floradora'.  Pictures of Rosa multibracteata as well as Rosa roxburghii normalis may be seen on Google Images.  Things get more interesting because Herb Swim, a great American rose hybridizer, came to the conclusion that 'Floradora' was the result of a SELF pollination of 'Baby Chateau' (refer to page 76 of Swim's book:  "-- ROSES --  from Dreams to Reality", published in 1988).  One might say that the ancestry of the 'Queen Elizabeth' rose remains SHROUDED IN MYSTERY !