An "old fashioned" rose

One of my unnamed seedlings from the 'Queen Elizabeth' rose has blooms that look rather old fashioned.  The blooms have the most petals of any of my seedlings, and in rose terminology are considered to be "very full".  It's interesting that even at an early age, when the seedling opened its very first bloom, this modern rose looked old fashioned.  That's its first bloom shown below in the photo on the left, and to its right is a photo of one of today's blooms.  I used the bloom on the right to make an official count of the number of petals, and there's all 119 of them displayed on the table in the third photo.

Photo taken:  August 11, 2009
Rose plant was just 3 months old

Photo taken:  September 16, 2015

 

Photo taken:  September 16, 2015

 

 

Photo taken:  August 5, 2016

Update of August 5, 2016:  I added a new photo today (the fourth photo above), seeing that the rose bush was displaying a beautiful cluster of blooms this morning.  The summer heat is making it easier for the "very full" blooms to open properly.

"Queen bees"

These warm days of September are attracting quite a few bees to my back yard roses, and I had the rare privilege of photographing two "queen bees" on a single rose bloom.  Now, an apiarist would argue that these aren't queen bees, because queen bees are the ones that remain in their hives tending to reproductive duties.  Ah, but you must consider that the pair of brotherly bees in the photo below are gathering their pollen from one of my 'Queen Elizabeth' rose blooms.  So why not call them "queen bees".

Photo taken:  September 9,  2015

The look-alikes

Among the various rose seedlings, roses from cuttings, and named commercial roses in my yard, I have 39 'Queen Elizabeth' seedlings that I "passively" bred by just letting my 'Queen Elizabeth' parent rose bush be open pollinated (most likely, SELF pollinated).  I knew that the parents and grand-parents of the 'Queen Elizabeth' rose were a diverse group, and I truly expected the seedlings to be very diverse themselves.  I didn't quite expect that out of the 39, only ONE seedling would grow up to actually look like its mother.  As an exercise, see if you can tell which bloom below is from one of my 'Queen Elizabeth' roses and which one is from the seedling in question.

Photo taken:  September 5,  2015

Photo taken:  September 5,  2015

If you identified the 'Queen Elizabeth' rose to be the one on the left, congratulations.  And, if you want to see many of the different-looking siblings of the unnamed seedling on the right, just keep reading this blog.  You will be surprised.

But first, a little bit of history.  The 'Queen Elizabeth' rose was introduced into commerce in 1954, but only after it took several years to build up enough stock for sales.  Its hybridizer, Walter Lammerts, actually made his cross of 'Charlotte Armstrong' x 'Floridora' in 1946, and one of his seedlings from that cross happily resulted in the 'Queen Elizabeth' rose.  I'm guessing that he saw the very first bloom of 'QE' sometime in late 1946 or early 1947.  Sadly, I doubt that anybody took a photo of that first bloom.

But maybe, just maybe, we can get a glimpse of what that bloom might have looked like if we look at the first bloom of my seedling (the rose on the right, as seen above) in a photo that I took in July of 2010 when the seedling was just 4 months old.  There it is below on the left.  And to its right is the same seedling as it stands 6 feet tall today, a rose bush that could easily be mistaken for 'Queen Elizabeth'.

Photo taken:  July 16,  2010

Photo taken:  September 5,  2015