For many a passionate hobby gardener it is not enough to just plant roses in the garden and care for them with dedication, they would like to grow beautiful roses themselves and maybe - with a bit of luck - create their own varieties. Growing roses is a beautiful and challenging hobby, but it requires some basic knowledge: you need to know how to breed roses.
Self-cultivating roses is exciting and can have surprising results
Create your own rose varieties by crossing
Anyone who breeds roses through vegetative propagation or grafting does not create new varieties, but only clones of the mother plant. If you want to breed completely new types of roses yourself, you have to do this by seed propagation. However, this requires a good deal of luck, because rose seeds with very different ancestors (many of which may not even be known) can produce anything - just maybe not exactly the desired result. For this reason, it is advisable to keep a stud book - if you do the pollination yourself and don't want to leave everything to chance. By the way: Not only cultivated roses develop from seeds, but often enough also the original wild roses. Growing roses is and will remain a very exciting hobby!
How does crossing work?
Each rose blossom is hermaphroditic, i. H. it has both male and female organs. In order for rose hips with seeds to develop, these flowers must be pollinated by another rose. This can either be done by the grower's hand or it can be left to nature by planting different varieties of roses in a bed and waiting to see what happens. The corresponding offspring are then raised and - if they have desirable traits - further selected and crossed with one another. It is important not to continue using roses with undesirable properties for breeding.
Which roses are suitable for crossing?
Not every rose variety or species is suitable for crossing, because some particularly noble cultivated roses are completely sterile and can therefore only be obtained through vegetative propagation. Other varieties - especially those with very double flowers - have very stunted sexual organs, so that pollination is difficult or impossible here as well. Still other roses form little or no rose hips at all.
Crossing roses - this is how you proceed
Now that you've found parent roses that will produce mature rose hips with seeds inside, you can hand pollinate them. This should be done for flowers that are just opening and where it is thus ensured that no pollination by bees etc. has taken place. Do the procedure early in the morning to forestall busy insects.
- Carefully remove the male pollen sacs (located around the female pistil),
- for which it is best to use a small, sharp knife.
- Put them in an airtight container and keep them for a few days.
- Shake the can several times to loosen the pollen.
- Now take a fine brush and transfer the pollen to the pistil of another rose.
- Wrap the pollinated flower in aluminum foil to protect it from cross-pollination.
- The foil can be removed after a few days.
tips
In the fall, collect the ripe rose hips to use for seeding. The seeds are sown and then it's time to wait and hope for the best. However, not all rose hips form germinable seeds.