Another day in the world of rose breeding! As a passionate rose breeder, my journey is filled with excitement, patience, and endless possibilities.
It is an exciting month at the nursery. Not only are we full steam ahead with the plans for Chelsea with the Royal Windsor Show and Hampton Court following behind them, but there’s lots to do with the roses too.
As we have not had great weather nature has put us a little further back than this time last year.
We started hybridising on 1st May which is a little later than we would normally of done due to lack of sunshine. Now we will be hybridising every day until late July. That means it is the exciting time when we have chosen which mother/father combination we will be putting together to create a unique rose.
I take a moment to relax and reflect on the progress so far. Rose breeding requires immense patience, as it often takes several years to see the results of our efforts. But the anticipation is part of the beauty of this journey. Each new seedling holds the promise of a future masterpiece.
Right now, the first flowers are opening on our seedling benches, so we can begin the selection / rejection process. This involves looking through them every day until mid September. We put labels on those we consider to be worthy of making it to the next stage and pull up those we reject and dispose of them. It seems harsh but when you consider we started with almost 40,000 seedlings, we need to be strict.
We are also starting to assess the 2022 seedlings and the 2021 seedlings on the beds outside, and as those come into flower we will collect images and make notes of our observations of those we select for the next stage. Again, we will reject any that are not good enough for the next stage of selection.
As you can see we are working on many roses in many stages of growth. This is where you can see what goes in to creating a variety that will eventually go on sale. It can be a long and arduous process over many years, but doing things this way mean we bring the very best quality of rose stock to our customers.
We hope to see you at Chelsea. Come and visit us on stand GPC039.
