Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and have you ever wondered how hard it would be to
identify a mystery rose let's say you moved into a yard and there was an unknown rose there you liked
the look of it could you tell just by looking at the flowers looking at the leaves looking at
how high it grows every year could you give it a name that you could be sure of the answer to that
question is quite mixed as you might imagine some roses have very distinctive features to them so
if you saw something like 'Ketchup & Mustard' i'll put a picture of that up on the screen
you might not have an easy time mistaking that for another rose on the other hand and i have
to give you the flip side of this because we're going to talk about this at some length is that
of the roses that i'm putting up on the screen right now can you tell me which one of them is
'Belinda's dream' out of all of these pink roses or if i put another screen up here of red roses could
you tell me which one of these is 'Olympiad' there's not much to distinguish them unfortunately because
breeders have been going for this high center tea look the florist rose look and they've been going
for clusters of flowers and they've been looking for these particular colors there have been many
dozens many hundreds maybe many thousands of these roses introduced over the years that
there would be you'd be hard-pressed to find the differences between them
and that could be far more difficult so this is the question i get a lot from people who
are trying to identify roses is can you identify this for me and i want to answer with a bit of
a question of my own to you actually i think it makes sense to start here which is why like why
is it important to you that you identify this rose like really think about this because it actually
could be difficult for some of those roses that are hard to distinguish between each other
and let me pose you a scenario let's say that you moved into a country estate of a of a very wealthy
british collector of roses the grand duchess of something or other and you knew that she had
collected roses all the way through her life and you had inherited the state or that you had taken
over the estate then it actually might make some sense if you had some mystery roses in that yard
to try to figure out exactly what they were you'd have grounds to think that they might be something
that's rare something that's unusual something that that can't be found in other people's gardens
so that's a situation where it might be worth the extra effort to look for those plants or if
you've taken over the uh the property of somebody who was in uh correspondence with ralph moore and
had traded roses back and forth again might be worth figuring out what those mystery roses were
but if you've taken over say a suburban yard built in the 90s some roses were put in sometime
then or sometime between then and now and you know that one of them is olympiad and just a
sort of a standard flora bunda or hybrid tea type roses that are in your yard would it be worth it
to go through all the time and trouble to identify that rose at this point in the conversation people
usually ask me the question well couldn't you just get a dna analysis done couldn't you just
match it to something else that's on the market it's not that i actually even know that there's
a service like this out there i've seen some studies where they try to narrow
down the families of roses and i'm sure DNA testing is something that can be done on roses
but would it be worth it and think about if you had a service that could be offered to you that
was worth oh say 150 dollars where you could really find out the ancestry of your owes and
match it to one of the commonly known roses on the market would it be worth spending 150
for roses that are produced by bare root or by other mass production methods and are available
in the stores for a small fraction of that price so you have to think about that a little bit
is what is the reason why you want to know what this rose is definitively unless you're selling
it unless you think it's collection worthy uh why not just enjoy the rose for what it is and when
it's not performing well anymore you can replace it with something that you do know the name of you
could label it and then then you'll know for sure so that's that's my first point in this topic is
before you go through all of the effort which can be a long effort of trying to figure out
what a rose is really be clear about whether it's worth it for you to start going down that road
let's say you've decided it's worth the trouble that you have some special feature
or some sentimental value or some reason why you really need to know what this plant is
that's fine let me give you some advice on that because it can be such an expansive search
i would say it's always better to start where the rose is start from the rose itself and then work
your way outwards this is going to sound so silly but dig around the base of your rows like dig
carefully and excavate the roots and the base of that rose carefully all the way around sometimes
you'll find a little metal tag a little engraved tag on there that was from the time of planting
or a little plastic tag just tucked in at the base of the plant i'm guilty of doing that myself
it might not be so easy as an engraved tag like i have on this rose here but if you look around
the area of the rose that's the first place i would start the second place i would say again
starting from the rose itself is start with the history of the rose what do you know
about how long ago it was planted do you have any idea of who planted it and can you go to
that source or can you figure out from there in terms of getting a definite id that would be
invaluable information okay so let's say there is no tag there is no provenance information
you don't know the person who planted it then you have to start again with the rose itself by
careful observation taking good pictures of not just the flower in its various stages but also
of the foliage taking records or at least keeping notes of how high it grows within one
season how many times it blooms within the year taking notes on its scent that's an important
distinctive feature so get as much information as you can from the rose itself now that you've
started with the rose then i would expand slowly outwards within your community it might be worth
a trip to the local garden center it has been something i've noticed about garden centers
that the people who buy the roses may prefer to buy the same roses year after year after year
because those are the ones they've chosen and they think are worth growing so it might be as simple
as going through two or three of the biggest local garden centers and just getting an idea
of what they carry and kind of comparing that to what you have in your garden if you get a match
fantastic the other local resource that you can use is your local garden club or rose society
because the people in your community have an idea of what's been doing well in local gardens
and what has been widely grown in local gardens so they might be a really really good resource
finally i will say that if you've taken enough pictures if you've taken enough notes about its
stature if you have the fragrance information if you know how long it reblooms you're in a good
position to write a good description of this and then place that onto one of the facebook
rose-related groups now one thing to be careful about these facebook groups
it just as a matter of courtesy is that some of them do not like the guessing game i've seen
on certain groups where they say please do not post pictures of roses without a correct id on
it we don't want to see that here so you have to know what the culture of the group is before you
get started other ones are much more welcoming of that guessing game and there you know the
hopeful thing is that there might be somebody out there who has grown your rose and might be
able to pinpoint it just perfectly from the first time they see it because they they're so familiar
with that rose or maybe they were a rose judge and they've seen this in exhibition so many times that
they know the fine detail of difference between you know golden celebration and the rose that
looks almost like it so that's uh that's what i would start with once you get there i will say
don't put the onus on other people particularly i mean you've taken your notes and you've learned
more about the rows this is the part where you're going to start learning about roses
itself i mean you know if you're an experienced person you might not already know this but you'll
get to know the difference between a miniature rose and a flora bunda rose and a hybrid tea rose
and then the shrubs and the climbers and if you can get an idea of what this rose does over time
the color and everything else you can just go to help me find match some of those criteria look for
some of those popular upvoted roses and then just get yourself a short list you know just say well
uh you know it's a it's a medium-sized uh rose you know in white uh looks like a hybrid tea
might be worth wondering if that's 'Pascali' or it might be worth wondering whether that's
Pope John Paul II i can't tell the difference myself right now but as i have some names that i that
i can just spit ball out there maybe something distinctive will come to me or maybe when i see
one of those in somebody else's garden i can tell the difference between those two roses so
that's the way i would start my search you know unfortunately i wish that i had a better or easier
answer that you could just email me a picture and i would recognize it and say yep that's the one
actually i've probably grown 250 to 300 different kinds of roses which is just a very small fraction
of what is out there on the market really so i might not even be your best resource but certainly
some of the facebook groups that specialize in roses have a lot more eyeballs and people have
grown a lot more roses than i have all right i hope that was useful for you and talking about
identifying an unknown rose if you have any other questions about roses their classes and how to
identify them please drop that into the comments below the video i'll see what i can do to help