Interesting and exciting to found out about this being grown in North America.

Cass -- I want 'em all -- but having seen the plants, I am content to enjoy them from afar.

Jeri

Gosh they are beautiful!

One bush is about the size of my backyard.

Thanks for the photos, Cass. I am envious...what spectacular roses. By the way, I have about 20 seedlings of 'Joycie' X 'Fortune's Yellow' that are now blooming size, thanks to your donation of pollen. I hope some of these will flower in the next 6 weeks.

Regards,
Paul

Good news, Paul. If you capture the bloom color of FDY, you will really have something.

Moving this up so I can find it faster at the library.

Thank you so much Cass for the superb photos. (And the Quarry Hill newsletter says that Michigan State is studying the pigments in the spontanea blooms.)
From a distance, how different are these from Safrano?
Am I seeing a darking of the pink petals with sun exposure?
And is there a sun induced splotch at the base of the mature cream petals?
And, the way the stems cascade downward, are they tip rooting?

Ann, this plant is the quintessential Synstylae, climbing, with perfect, high-centered, scrolled buds that open into little, weird, misshapen single blooms of remarkable color transformations. Yes, the pink form darkens to madder red as it ages. Any exposure to sunlight seems to affect every exposed bit of the bud and bloom, including the sexual organs. The open blooms are nothing to write home about except that they are very strongly scented - - Tea and something else profound and distinct that I can't identify - - and it makes me sneeze.

The spot in the center of the cream form is the sun-exposed petal coloring and maybe creeping coloration from the darkening disk. I can clearly see the outline of the sepal against the cream petals: the petal is white where the sepal shaded it from the sun and pink where the petal was exposed to the sun. And the disk turns red too, either in exposure to sunlight or in maturity.

The canes do not tip root at all. It is one large haystack of a climber, arching up and over.

I've been reading some papers on xylem and phloem and distances of nutrient transport. And for a plant to pull moisture out of the soil, move it up and over and out and down....isn't that common. Most that go down then put down roots to help the process along.
Any feel for when the growth season is? (In my garden laevigata and fortuniana seem tp prefer winter growth although there's a lesser push in summer.) How old are those wonders, anyway?

It's easy to see that many climbing roses have canes that don't transport xylem and/or phloem downwards. A long cane grows up, arches out and then weighs down. That single season, it's lovely. The next season, a new "leader," meaning a new really long continuing lateral, will grow from the apex of the arch. Once that lateral starts growing, the tip of the older arching cane will gradually starve back to the budeye of the new leader.

In our mediterranean climate in zone 8b, at least, these evergreen roses grow when they have water and when they have optimal temperatures. So these roses can grow a foot in October if it rains in October. It rains a bit in November, a lot in December, January and February. March is doesn't rain that much, and it rains a bit in April. Then it stops and the soils are quite dry by mid- to late June. The best growth occurs in October and March, April and May unless the plants are irrigated heavily It would be interesting to know the rainfall pattern in their native range. They do not grow in December, January and February in my garden.

I don't know how old the Quarryhill plants are. I did not photograph an accession tag for the cream Spontanea. Maybe I didn't see one. The Pink form is Accession No. 2001226A. The database says it was collected in 1988...but the accession number indicates a 2001 date. Was that the date of germination? Of planting? There's a second batch of Spontanea with a 1988 accession date. They were both from a single collection in 1988. You can search their accessions using the link below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Database of Asian Plants in Cultivation

Re berndoodle's first paragraph: and for a leader to emerge from the apex is so different from the R. multiflora emergence of the next leader from much farther down/closer to the roots on the original cane.
I haven't been under laevigata yet this spring to see what's happened with wichurana.
(As my own 'from China' roses, I wonder at the divergence of basic characteristics)
I did download the rose part of the database yesterday, but the library computer screens were too small to let me read the whole thing. Huge amount of data on it.

Any thoughts why Slater's Crimson China (at least two that I've tried) are such wimps? Esp when some of the other red chinas (Sanguinea) are so impressive.

Ann, I have no thoughts about Slater's Crimson China, only guesses. I couldn't grow the thing. I harbor doubts that it is the real thing. Hopefully someone doing genetic studies will choose one of the SCC's that are floating around and try to show it is an ancestor.

I wonder whether they've been fully verified by Quarryhill, or simply maintained the name they were collected with; while they do have single flowers as only var. spontanea theoretically should (knowing that double flowers are generally recessive to single, it isn't always quite so simple), the color should only be red for that variety according to the botanical powers that be. Perhaps they could be hybrids with another species such as Rosa gigantea, which might explain some of their differences. Without genetic tests, it's impossible to eliminate such a possibility, which is why it's so important to adhere fairly strictly to the descriptions when such tests aren't being performed.

Stefan, I'm thinking that Spontanea is far from "fully verified" on a couple of level. Did you see Martyn Rix's new description in Curtis's Botanical Magazine in 2005 which reclassified Spontanea as a form rather than a variety? His description accurately captures the roses in Quarryhill.

DESCRIPTION. A large shrub with arching branches or a climber to 8 m.
Young shoots with recurved, hooked, red to brown thorns, without bristles
or glands. Side shoots smooth or with scattered small recurved thorns. Leaves
with 3, 5 or 7 leaflets, somewhat coriaceous, shining green above, paler and
glabrous beneath, finely and sharpely toothed, the teeth tipped with red
glands; the terminal leaflet largest and often acuminate, 4.5Â6 cm long,
2Â2.5 cm wide. Rhachis with small, hooked thorns, and scattered, red-tipped
glands; stipule very narrow, 0.5Â2 mm wide, adnate to the rhachis for most
of its length, edged with red glands, the free part 1Â2 mm long, spreading.
Flowers usually solitary, on short side shoots, generally cupped, 5Â6 cm across.
Receptacle and pedicel glabrous. Sepals 5, more or less equal, 2.5Â3 cm long,
linear-lanceolate, with appressed silky hairs on the inner surface, pale edges
and often with somewhat leafy tips, reflexing as the flower opens, soon falling
after flowering. Petals 5, broadly ovate, 3Â4 cm long and wide, opening pale
pink, buff or cream with red lines, usually becoming red to purple on
exposure to sunlight; otherwise opening red or purplish. Stamens numerous,
yellowish. Styles red, silky, exserted but not fused. Hips round, c. 2 cm across,
green becoming orange-yellow. Seeds few and large, 2Â3 per hip, with a hard,
thick seed-coat.
DISTRIBUTION. NW China; Sichuan, Gansu, Hubei, Guizhou.

What this doesn't address is that, according to article by Bruneau, Starr and Joly, "Phylogenetic Relationships In The Genus Rose: New Evidence from
Chloroplast DNA Sequences and an Appraisal of Current Knowledge," the ploidy results for Spontanea have been diploid, triploid and tetraploid. So it looks as if there's work left to be done. I don't think this is a problem at Quarryhill but rather with the possibly hybridity (or fecundity) of Spontanea itself.

Here's the abstract and links for the Bruneau, Starr and Joly article Cass mentions above.

Here is a link that might be useful: in Systematic Botany