A few of my roses

Hi all

Just thought i'd add a couple of pics from my garden of my spring roses,hope you like them.

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Climb. Red Pierre
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Fourth of July
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Magma
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Big Purple

4th of July is such a happy plant! I'm hoping my three cutting grown plants take off like this.. I intend to use it in breeding a bit this year if I can get it to flower.

Great Roses, Phil. I love Red Pierre, it has outdone itself for me this year. Magma is a pretty impressive rose, it's well named. Big Purple is magnificent.

Ohhh.. I love your Big Purple

I bought 'Blackberry Nip' this year in the hope it will be a good purple to breed with.. how'd you like a tea rose in that colour ? I intend to put 'Francis Dubreuil NOT', 'St Francis Xavier', 'Pape Gontier', and 'Monsieur Tillier' onto 'Blackberry Nip' this year (flowers permitting) to try for this goal and then back breed to Teas again to dilute out the HT blood.

Thanks for the nice comments , what your doing sounds amazing Simon,way over my head that's for sure,would love to hear more about how you do it.

Magma looks gorgeous

Great looking roses Phil.
Simon, that sounds like a lot of work and I am wondering why you want to breed out the HT blood so to speak. They would make a great cut flower which I thought were one of the things you were thinking of going into?

Cut flowers are secondary to good rose shrubs... HT = evil

LOL Maybe you just need to move...

Yes... maybe you are right... I'm thinking maybe into a bubble so the HT can grow well without disease

Actually, it's interesting to note now which ones are coming down with BS and which aren't. I really should get out there and use some EcoRose or something. Now that I have a spare moment. (It will most likely be raining tomorrow instead :p )

Really great rose photos Roselover, the two that my satalite plan will let me see.

Thanks rosemeadow and Carole for your comments.
Simon i'm curios to know,has the hybridisation of the tea roses taken away some of that old genetic resitance to disease?,it seems that alot of the nurseries are pushing them,keen to hear your views

Firstly I think it is important to make the clear distinction that pretty much all the modern roses pushed by nurseries are Hybdrid Teas and not in fact Tea roses. Tea roses are an old class of rose that was used to develop the Hybrid Teas by crossing things like Hybrid Perpetuals into them. So modern Hybrid Teas are very different to the superior Teas... when I say superior... I mean in Australia in a lot of areas and by this I mean the Teas descend from roses such as Rosa gigantea and Rosa chinensis which makes them very suitable for Australia's hot and often humid conditions.

When you start putting in roses that have more of a penchchant for colder conditions and shorter growing seasons we start having trouble with them here. Down here in Tasmania, Teas still out perform the Hybrid Teas eventually but they cannot match the Hybrid Tea for early vigour... this is still a generalisation because some of the Teas, like 'Climbing Devoniensis', are extremely vigorous down here as well... I'm just speaking in general terms. Up where Gary lives, the Teas literally jump out of the ground in many cases and form large lavish bushes in just a few years. They perform in a similar way in many parts of Sydney. Down here they take three years just to establish and then another three years to start building up.

The Hybrid Teas also have many problems ... a lot of them descend from roses such as Rosa foetida, which according to many people is where the black spot issues of roses came from (incidently, people also claim that the mildew issues in roses came from Rosa chinensis). So given a choice I would never use Hybrid Teas in hybridising work unless they had a specific trait, like a dark purple as in 'Blackberry Nip', that is not found often in other roses and then I would be trying to breed out the Hybrid Tea traits to concentrate the other more desireable features such as better architecture and better disease resistance. Tea roses are not without their problems and they still get diseases like black spot and mildew down here for me and it is rare to get many saturated colours in them but on the whole they represent an ideal starting point for someone wanting to breed roses that are better suited to conditions in Australia. Don't get me wrong, I love the subtle watercolour palette of the Teas, but I also love the blood red of other roses and the eye-bleed oranges etc. The reason I chose the Teas above to put with 'Blackberry Nip' is becuase so far they have shown the best saturation of colour that I think might marry well with the purple colour of 'Blackberry Nip'. 'Madame Lambard' has also show quite good colour saturation and might get a go too but has so far shown itself to be a little spotty here.

I would cross 'Blackberry Nip' with, for example, 'Papa Gontier' and the resulting seedlings would be normal Hybrid Tea or Shrub roses. I would then go back to Teas like 'Papa Gontier' to concentrate the Tea blood and preserve the seedlings with the greatest concentration of purple each time. It's a long multi-gernerational process but I think it's worth it because the day will come when we are not allowed to use chemicals to control diseases in our gardens and roses are going to have to be able to stand on their own without chemical intervention... personally I say it can't come soon enough... but for that to happen the majority (not all) of the hyrbid Teas will need to fall into obscurity and people will need to change their ways. It's also not going to be as easy as outlined above either... there is no magic bullet

Fascinating stuff! Thanks for your comments,given me alot to think about and the direction i want to head with my roses.
I found an interesting article if any of the other begginers are interested, go to wikipedia and look up garden roses,heafty reading but certainly filled in some blanks for me on the development of the rose