Garden roses are typically grafted onto wild rose rootstock to improve overall hardiness and resistance to disease. Not knowing this, I saw what l thought were tiny deformed buds on my plants and thought they had contracted some horrible wasting disease. But the wild rootstock often sends up wild-type stems that account for the “diseased” look.
I realized what was happening when I looked at the wild roses that run rampant between Willow Creek and the parking lot of the local Walmart (only in Oregon), and noticed that the buds on those plants were exactly the same as the “deformed” buds on my plants. The wild blooms look like this; you can also see one or two of the supposedly deformed buds:
And they’re on the same bush as these:
Note to the wise: Wild rose stems and leaves are as thorny AF. Even the leaves have thorns on the back, along the main leaf-stem.
Does that imply that all those videos on YouTube about how easy it is to make a new rose from cuttings will give you rose bushes that are particularly prone to disease? I watched one and now my feed is full of those and similar videos according to which everything can be propagated by cuttings and there is a big conspiracy to make you pay for commercially propagated plants that are unnecessarily expensive. So, if I understand you right: they are expensive, but there is a reason for that. They have made them hardy, and that is work.
The rootstock rose you show is not the common one, which is “Dr.Huey” an ugly dark red semi-double rose. It might be a rootstock species typically used in northern climates, Rosa rugosa, which is indeed prickly as fuck. The buds don’t look deformed at all, they look like rose buds.
By the way, ‘wild rose’ conveys little, botanically. Depending on whether you are a lumper or a splitter, there are some 300 to 1000 species of roses worldwide, and all of them are ‘wild’ in that they are not domestic hybrids.
If you see leaves and stems rising from below the bud graft on your rose, that look distinct from the ones above the bud graft, rub them off. Those will be from your root stock rose. Can happen if the bud graft gets buried or wounded, or if the grafted rose weakens so much that the rootstock takes over. In California you see those Dr.Huey roses growing in neglected or abandoned gardens all over.
Some roses are normally grown on their own roots. Particularly climbers (which tend to be extra vigorous). Not much in horticulture is as complex as rose propagation. Modern hybrids draw from many different species and sports (mutations). They are extremely artificial compared to most other garden plants, and aren’t in fact all that easy to grow well.
After two out of three of my shrub roses winter killed despite being protected and classified for my zone, I started planting peonies, which love inland New England, as roses do not.
Thanks for the explanation! Looks like a rabbit hole I should avoid, my gardening skills are rudimentary. Better not start with the most complex flower, I guess, when so many annuals are available from seed. Peonies sound good, though. My climate (Berlin, Germany) is continental: hot summers and frosty winters. My soil is very humid.
Presumably roses propagated from cuttings would be more disease prone, but by how much? I don’t know. But if it’s easy as the videos make out, I suppose you can akways propagate another plant to replace one that sickens and dies.
Personal crackpot hypothesis: When Juan Diego brought the flowers to the bishop, the bishop was so out-of-touch with ordinary life in Mexico that he didn’t even know the difference between roses and poinsettias (which do normally grow and bloom in Mexico in December).
I Googled for images but what I found didn’t help much. I can’t say they’re actually ugly, but they look a bit primitive, like the roses seen in medieval and renaussance paintings, or like the stylized roses that symbolized the opposing factions in the Wars Of The Roses.
I have a very old rose that just died this year. Last year, its base started sprouting, and the roses were indeed very like this. I actually think they’re pretty and don’t know what people think is wrong with them.
The grafted plant died over the winter, but the base is still going strong.
Ours were red rather than pink. It bloomed as a vast bank of long-lasting flowers, twice a year in Melbourne, and I’ve loved it ever since. It was incredibly robust, but not highly invasive. The cows used to come and crop the other side of the fence, and that didn’t bother it at all, but for all it’s size, it never grew bushy enough to block the driveway, nor thick enough to destroy the fence.
The other roses never grew large enough to go over the fence: they limped along covered in aphids, a couple of large flowers occasionally survived. I’d choose a good four-petal wild rose any day of the week.
It depends on the disease. Airborne disease like blackspot? That is dependent on your climate and the specific rose’s susceptibility. What rootstocks give you is resistance to soil borne diseases, and hardiness. But mainly what they do is make roses cheaper to produce. Grafting can produce a marketable-sized plant in 18 months, while it might take 3 years for an own-root rose to get that big.
Interesting hypothesis that fits in with Mexican flora, but it’s not supported by the text of the Nican Mopohua, the manuscript account of the apparition that was recorded around 1556, 30 years after the apparition. The text specifies that the flowers were “Castilian roses” that didn’t normally bloom in the area with December frosts (Tepeyac Hill, near Mexico City, is at an elevation of 7000+ feet) Also, they had a strong fragrance, which poinsettias don’t.
Is there such a thing? I thought that the rose family tended towards fivefold symmetry, and that thus, a rose with a small number of petals would have five of them.
LOL I love the description:
“A look at the building which houses the ‘Loose Women’s Institute’, not as exciting as it sounds as Loose is the name of their village!”
After WW2 ended, many Brits found jobs scraping the blackout paint from the windows of 11,000 railway passenger cars. (they had all been painted black earlier in the war to stop light from escaping and possible detection by the enemy).
