Amateur rose breeders can be bloomin’ lucky

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 10

Amateur rose breeders can be bloomin’ lucky

Finding a new bloom is not easy, says DUO writer JACK PLEASANT in the first of a two-part article.

“There is a lot of luck as well as expertise involved in hybridising roses. Although it can take a professional grower eight years to put a tried and tested new rose on the market, probably discarding around 250,000 inferior plants on the way, the odd amateur in a back garden has on occasion come up with a winner,” says rosebreeder Tony Gregory. “I think some amateurs are more adventurous than professional growers, not being so commercially minded. They might quite happily, for instance, try crossing a miniature rose with a climber! The result could be very interesting. “Rose-breeding is something more gardeners should attempt. And you don’t have to be too patient. Seeds produced in the autumn can be flowering seedlings next summer.”

The amateur who is fortunate enough to pro-

duce a really exceptional new rose has hit the jackpot. A professional grower could pay him around $14,000 for the right to develop and market it and the amateur’s share of the royalties on every plant sold should earn him a comfortable living. Then there are those people or organisations who are often prepared to pay as much as $50,000 for the privilege of naming a new rose. Tony Gregory says he was very satisfied with the fee he was paid by the Solid Fuel Advisory Service for naming one of his best roses Living Fire. Roses, have also been named Silent Night, after a type of mattress, Glenfiddich, after the famous whisky, National Trust and Boys Brigade. But often growers for go such sums in order to give their “new baby” a more appropriate name. Many name them after close womeri relatives. And there are also roses

named Torville and Dean, Mountbatten and Elizabeth of Glamis. There is even a Margaret Thatcher, produced by an admirer of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Famous Irish rose grower Sam McGredy, now based in New Zealand, says he has had some strange suggestions for naming roses. “A woman once asked me to name one after her parish priest’s dog which had just died,” he said. “The dog’s name was Inter — short for Interdenominational.

"Apparently, it bit

Catholics and Protestants alike. I couldn’t oblige. It was a remarkarble enough name for a dog, let alone a rose.” Tony Gregory says he often gets letters from pop fans at his Stapleford, Nottinghamshire, rose gardens, asking him to name roses after their idols, such as 'Tina Turner, Mick Jagger and Cliff Richard. He has to disappoint them. Perhaps the most romantic story behind a rose is that of one of the most famous of all — peace. Soon after the start of World War Two, French rose grower Francis Meilland managed to send a handful of the new roses he was developing to a friend in America. The insignificant bundle of stems got out in a diplomatic bag on the last plane to leave Paris before the Nazis arrived. Meilland’s American friend, Robert Pyle, of

Pennsylvania, planted the roses and was delighted to discover that one of them produced wonderful pale gold blooms with a tinge of pink that were the most beautiful roses he had ever seen. He named them Peace and the variety proved to be a moneyspinner. When the war ended $500,000 in royalties awaited the Meilland family and within ten years a remarkable 30,000,000 Peace rose bushes were being grown throughout the world. In his diary Francis Meilland wrote: “How strange to think that all these millions of rose bushes sprang from a seed no bigger than the head of a pin — a seed we might so easily have overlooked or neglected in a moment of inattention, or which might have been relished as a titbit by a hungry fieldmouse.” Copyright Duo.