Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I want to talk about the question
of why would your roses change colors and i most often hear this from people who bought a rose in
the last couple of years placed it in their garden and suddenly it moved dramatically from one color
over to a brand new color of rose and so i want to divide this out into a couple of different ways
that that color change can happen but first one i'm going to say is that i've heard the
explanation that it's cross-pollination that the bees moved the pollen from one plant to another
and that that changed the color of the rose that is categorically not true and i'll explain why at
the back end of this video but other than that there are a few different ways that your roses
can change colors and behind me is an example of a rose that opens with bright orange buds and then
opens out to lighter yellow colored flowers don't underestimate the kind of change that can make to
have a difference in temperature or a difference in moisture can actually make a big difference to
how the initial roses present in your in your garden and this is a more subtle kind of color
change this isn't the dramatic you know changing from white to red or changing from pink to yellow
kind of color change i'm talking about this would be more in the range of
going from a deeper apricot or orange to a lighter yellow or going from a deep pink to a more washed
out pink or almost white that kind of color change is definitely within the range of what
is natural for a rose to vary in the garden let's talk about some of the more dramatic color changes
directly behind me here is 'Baron Girod de l'Ain' which is a hybrid perpetual rose with these deep pink
almost red flowers with a very distinctive white edge on the petal now let's say you
bought a rose like this and then suddenly you saw that there was a brand new shoot
coming right from the base of the plant that came up it looked kind of funny different
color foliage maybe different leaf count and suddenly it bloomed with a cluster flowering
white bloom with very few petals well that one is very easy to understand what the problem is
you're you've had a rose that has been grafted and the root stock has expressed its genetics
now there's nothing unusual about this this has been a very common production system
in the 20th century 21st century is that roses are grown in a big field on a grafted rootstock
the rootstock is supposed to give the plant additional vigor and make the production of
the plant easier but it's genetically different than the top stock or the scion stock of the plant
so the scion is supposed to look like this the root stock sends up its own genetic
shoots and now it blooms in a completely different color on a climber you may go
from having a gorgeous white or pink climber then all of a sudden you see these dark red
roses coming out of it that's dr huey root stock many of the root stocks that i've seen up here in
canada might be a multiflora rootstock with those little white flowers or canina rootstock all of
these are just different looking plants that have different characteristics of their roots
and if they ever send a shoot that then it's going to have different looking flowers your answer to
that is very easy you go and find that shoot you follow it right down to the bottom of the plant
and you cut it as deep as you can even down below the surface of the soil if you can and then you
watch for additional suckers that are that are that are planning to come up one more way that
your rose can change colors and i want to talk about this one because it's actually probably the most
fascinating of them is a spontaneous genetic mutation of a portion or a stem of the plant
and this rose here it's it's yellow right now this is the version we know of it but if
all of a sudden you had a just a slight genetic variation that made these yellow flowers come
off entirely white just pure white that would be called a sport it would happen in one stem
one branch of the plant and you'd look and you say okay these flowers are identical they're blooming
at exactly the same time but one of them is yellow and one of them is white they have identical scent
what's going on if you took a cutting from that from that stem that was white and then
planted it elsewhere in the garden and it stayed true to that color that would be called a stable
sport of the initial variety an example of this that happens a lot in the garden is
iceberg iceberg is a shrub rose well-known white shrub rose florabunda and it actually has sported
into climbing iceberg brilliant pink iceberg burgundy iceberg it just has a lot of genetic
variation within its dna that it can express on one shoot or another then people have found those
variations and they've capitalized on them by propagating from them and making a new variety one
example of this a long-standing example of this is rosa gallica officinalis the apothecary rose it's
a historical rose from you know i think as long as the history books have been around it's sported
somewhere i think in the 1200 1300 range it's sported over to rosa mundy which has stripes on it
now that rosa mundy you can still find in gardens but it's very uncommon to find a variety or sorry
a specimen of rosamundi that isn't continuously reverting back to rosa gallica officinalis so
you will find the striped flowers on the plant but you'll also find some stems that usually
have the straight pink variety that's just genetic variation moving back and forth on the same plant
okay let's talk about why this is not an issue of cross-pollination and i think this comes from
just a dramatic misunderstanding of plant biology once this flower when this flower is forming it's
closed it's genetically like its mother plant it doesn't take any pollen from anybody until
much much later once it's opened and then it's uh its pistols will become uh receptive to accepting
pollen from other plants by that time the flower is already formed there's no opportunity there
for the genetics from another plant from the pollen of another plant to get in there
and change the form of the flower so that one is just an old wives tale i've heard it a few times
and people trying to explain why they've had color changes in their roses no there's no way
you can transfer the pollen from another plant and change the genetics of an existing flower or even
of the mother plant it just can't happen all right thanks so much for watching
today i hope you enjoyed this discussion of why your roses may change colors and
if you have any comments or questions please drop those down in the comments of the video