Start Roses from Seed

by Lenore Hedla, Anchorage Times Staff Writer

If you’ve never grown roses from seed, this is a good week to start. The ruddy "hips" on hardy shrub roses are packed with seeds. If you promised her a rose garden — or a 150-foot rose hedge — you can trade time for money.

Mrs. Lester Mears of Palmer, a consulting rosarian of the American Rose Society, gathers rose hips at any stage of ripeness, from "one pink cheek" to mushy-ripe, preferably before the prolonged winter freeze.

A good kind to start with is the rugged, amiable Rugosa clan — Alaska’s beloved "Sitka" rose is a Rugosa. The roses in the hedge around the Centennial Rose Garden on the Delaney Park Strip are off-spring of Mrs. Mears’ Rugosas.

Sowing rose seeds is easy. Here’s how Betty Mears does it. Mrs. Mears removes the seeds from the hips and washes them in a cup of water to which she adds a drop of detergent and a drop of laundry bleach. She rinses the seeds, then dries them on a towel.

Milled sphagnum moss, saturated with water and squeezed dry, is mixed with the seeds. Mrs. Mears puts hers in a small jar, making sure some seeds are visible through the glass so she can tell when germination takes place.

The jar is covered lightly and stowed in the refrigerator, labeled and dated. you could use a plastic bag, secured with a twist-tie, and check it occasionally to keep it moist.

Depending on variety, rose seeds germinate in a 40-degree refrigerator in 30 to 120 days. The Rugosas sprout in about 90 days — if they don’t, give them more time and they may shape up. When thread-like roots show through the jar, they’re ready for potting up, so check them as the time draws near. You may get one seedling, or many.

Shake the peat moss out of the jar and plant the seedlings in little pots or flats of commercial potting mix.

Set the pots on trays of wet gravel or enclose them in open plastic bags to create a greenhouse climate.

Give the young ones all the light you can, either at a window or under florescent tubes. Mrs. Mears turns her pots as the plants bend to the light and fertilizes them every other week with a diluted water-soluble fertilizer.

By planting-out time, around the first of June, the roses are several inches tall, ready to go into a nursery bed where they won’t get pushed around by the big plants. They can go into permanent garden locations the following spring and by the third year they may bloom sparsely. When they do, you can tell Luther Burbank to move over — you’ve pulled off a pretty respectable horticultural feat.

Author Lenore Hedla is a popular Alaskan garden writer. Her most recent book, The Alaska Gardener’s Handbook (High North Press, 1994), is available in bookstores throughout Alaska.

This article was originally published in the Anchorage Times, November 1, 1974. ©1974, Anchorage Times.
This article was reprinted in the September/October 1995 issue of The Alaska Rose, newsletter of the Alaska Rose Society.

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Last modified: July 13, 2003