Hey again, it's Jason at Fraser Valley Rose Farm.
I'm here with another one of my videos on the old garden roses, this time to discuss
the hybrid perpetuals.
I probably would have gone ahead and discussedthe portlands, except I put out a little poll,
and you guys said you wanted to see the hybrid perpetuals first.
That works out just great, because the hybrid perpetuals are the natural extension of the
china roses I introduced last time.
As the chinas came into the trade in Europe they began to make a real mess.
I mentioned this last time, that the gallicas, the damasks, the albas and all the other groups
that were present in Europe previously were bred with the chinas in the quest to bring
in reblooming to the other roses.
When they did that, it made a mish-mash of ways to categorize the new roses.
The hybrid perpetuals were the answer to that.
Breeders took all of the roses that were hybrids of the chinas, and the European roses and
everything else that was present at the timeand dumped them into a category - as soon
as they achieved reblooming, they called them the hybrid perpetuals.
It's a massive group, and a massively influential group.
Before I get into those, I just want to remind you that across the bottom of the screen there
should be a "CC" button, and as soon as I can, I'll go back through the transcript of
this video and I'll correct some of the Latin and French spellings of the names I'm trying
to pronounce, so that you don't get misled by my poor pronunciation.
I'm going to be right upfront with you and tell you that I have a Love/Hate relationship
with the hybrid perpetuals.
The love part is for the roses themselves.
I grow probably a dozen of the in my garden, including some of my very favorites: 'Alfred
Colomb', 'Paul Neyron', 'Baron Girod de l'Ain', 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain'.
Just wonderful roses, and they've stood the test of time in gardens.
Some of these have been around for 150 years now and really have proven their worth.
The "hate" part is a little more complicated: I want to draw you back to the video I made
on the gallicas.
The "queen" of roses I mentioned at that time was Empress Josephine of France, and she had
a certain style about her.
You might say it was decadent for sure, possibly a little informal, and even towards hedonistic.
There was a certain joie de vivre about the way she gardened that sort of changed as we
go towards the next "queen" of roses.
The next queen of roses I can identify in history is Queen Victoria of England - bringing
in the Victorian era.
It was more characterized by formality, modesty, a tightening of moral standards.
It gets a little more formal and I have to say that it crept into the way that we enjoy
roses, rose gardening, and gardening in general from the era.
This is around the time that the horticultural societies were founded, the collections of
plants and the botanical gardens, and the flower exhibitions were all coming into being
around the 1830s and 1840s.
So there was a certain amount of formality that came into the hobby, including the Victorian
style of gardening.
It was characterized by geometrically shaped beds, usually squares, rectangles or triangles.
Formal planting patterns, geometric plantings, carefully spaced plants.
The rose was eventually "tamed" for the era.
While the hybrid perpetuals began as a hodgepodge of all these very different roses with characteristics
of all their different ancestors, varying heights and flower shapes.
Eventually, they came to be shaped by their usage in the Victorian era, which included
having them placed into formal gardens, pruned heavily each year, they were bred for tall,
angular growth and large flowers for the exhibitions.
The roses themselves turned out beautifully.
The carryover into rose culture is something that I don't like too much.
The reason for that is because I think it's quite a bit of baggage that roses carry with
them, even to today.
Your rose gardeners, or people just coming into the hobby are looking at these formal
rose gardens and wondering if they can live up to that standard.
Maybe it doesn't appeal to them to have geometric shaped gardens, or gardens with only roses
in them.
That was a fashion of the time, but it's certainly not the way that roses grow their best.
They compliment the plants around them, and the plants around them help the roses.
So their better for mixed planting, but that was the style of the time.
Also insofar as the rose societies are concerned, I still find that they focus a little too
much, in my opinion, on the exhibition of roses.
That grand old tradition where you lop of the heads of the roses, embalm them, put them
in a funeral parlor at cold temperatures and submit them for judging.
That can be an intimidating display.
It's still a grand old tradition in a certain way, and I do enjoy a good rose exhibition
when I have a visit, but I can see how this could intimidate brand new people to the hobby.
With that mini-rant out of the way, maybe I'll take you through some of the general
characteristics of the hybrid perpetuals, before I bring you though a large number of
different exampled that I have pictures to show you of.
The first thing I'll put up here is an ad from the Conrad Pyle company around 1930.
You can see that the hybrid perpetuals look a lot like the modern hybrid teas, which are
their natural successors in the garden.
They hybrid perpetuals were a little more limited than the hybrid teas in their range
of colors, they were a lot hardier, and in general not as good at reblooming, and didn't
have the "tea" shaped flowers.
Instead of describing them in contrast to the hybrid teas, maybe I'll just say that
in general, they range from white through red (or almost red) in their colors, all the
way through the pinks.
There weren't too many yellows, and certainly not orange.They were very hardy.
You can see in the ad here if you can read the fine print that the Conrad Pyle company
is recommending them for planting in Alaska.
I'll leave to our friends in Alaska to tell me if that's true.
They were also generally very nicely scented, usually upright in habit, and some of them
were almost thornless - or at least a lot less thorny than the original European type
roses.
That's something I didn't mention in the china video is that china roses tend to be a lot
less thorny than the European roses.
In examples like Paul Neyron or Alfred Colomb they tend to be a lot less thorny.
On to the individual roses, I have quite a few to power through here, so I'll go through
them quite quickly.
The first one I want to show you is my garden favorite of all time, 'Baron Girod de l'Ain'
which is an almost-red, ruby colored rose with a white lip around the outside edge of
the petals - which add so much definition and charm to this rose.
It's a 5 foot tall rose, roughly, with long stems, great as a cut flower and beautifully
scented.
For me, it's like the perfect rose.
The second one is the one that popularized the whole class.
It's called 'la Reine', and 'La Reine' came out around 1840 - its sumptuous pink with
so many petals that it was the one that really gave the class headway against the centifolia
class that was so popular at the time because it had so many petals.
This really turned some heads, and it brought many breeders back into breeding the hybrid
perpetuals, making them the dominant class of the time.
The third one I want to talk about is 'Paul Neyron' - 'Paul Neyron' is also very full
of petals, but has stupid-large flowers.
When I cut the first flowers of the season, they're big - like peony big, with lots of
petals.
Very globular.
Very nicely scented.
I will that it's a much more vertical rose than it is horizontal.
It'll shoot up to 6 feet or more without adding much width to the rose at all.
To expand a little bit on the color and form available in these roses, I should mention
'General Jacqueminot' - which is reputed to have brought the color red into the modern
roses, so you'll find it in the breeding of a lot of the modern red roses.
Also, to show you the lighter colors, I have 'Paul's Early Blush' and 'Frau Karl Drushki'
- I'll put up the pictures here.
Also I should show you 'Alfred Colomb' which had beautiful wavy or scalloped edges of the
outer petals - gorgeous!
Love it in my garden.
For a few more examples, I want to introduce 'Baronne Prevost' which is a lovely deep pink,
and if you smell it, it has the most wonderful damask scent - carried over from its ancestors.
I also want to talk about 'Schon Ingeborg' which is a German bred rose, I think, which
has a darker center in the flower - so darker pink in the center, with lighter petals on
the outside, making for a great color contrast.
To get into a striped rose, I'll show you 'Commandant Beaurepaire' here which is unusual
rose in that it has very pale green foliage, so if it looks like the foliage is a bit on
the yellow side, don't try to fix by feeding it...
I made that mistake and overfed it.
It will still have that pale, almost yellowish color to the leaves.
A beautiful rose that blooms in small flushes through the entire season.
Last but not least, I want to mention 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain' which is another one of
my favorites in the garden.
It grows well in a bit of shade, so anywhere I have a spot where I'm not sure there's enough
sun, I stick in 'Souv. du Docteur Jamain' and it makes a climbing rose and has the darkest
purple, almost velvety blooms.
Definitely worth seeking that one out if you can find it.
That wraps up my thoughts on the hybrid perpetuals, I want to thank everyone for watching.
I know it was quite a long list of roses.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave those below the video.
And because I like to leave one little tidbit of information for back end of the video,
for those who are fanatical enough to stick around to the end: I want to talk a little
bit about the breeding of the roses.
Let me start with this: repeat flowering is a recessive characteristic.
So genetically, for these roses to have reliable repeat flowering, they have to have two generations
of repeat flowering parentage in them.
They may get some of that from the Autumn Damask, through the Bourbons or the Portlands,
but most of that would have come from the chinas.
So, if you wanted to look at the genetics, they are probably at least half china, and
some of them may be up to 75% china.
The hybrid teas, which are the offspring of the hybrid perpetuals, are back crossed to
the tea roses, which is another china group.
So you could presume that more like 75% through 87% of the genetics in your modern roses are
from China.
That's helps to emphasize how important the genetics of the china roses were to the modern
roses.
Thanks again for watching!