That's not a split bud. It's a cluster of new vegetative shoots which will become new branches. I don't know what you mean by "radical pruning," but if excess wood is removed, then the plant won't bloom for a year or more until it replaces some of the missing wood. I suspect that's why you don't have any flower buds.

Hi chrisswks, You definitely have a bug problem. If you break open one of the yellowing buds, you will probably find a small worm feasting. You can use Sevin or a sprayable insecticide. Pick off any yellowing buds before you spray. BTG

You're welcome, Luxrosa. You might as well stack the deck in your favor as much as you possibly can! I saw a great tee shirt yesterday, "I'm not CHEATING...I'm playing by MY rules!" Practicing germinating things BEFORE you create the "perfect rose" is much like that. For years while in school, I worked camera counters in department stores. It used to make me cringe to the floor for people who hit the counter with, "I'm leaving for a month in Europe tomorrow and I NEED a good camera!" Same danged thing! Start something you know nothing about and which requires some acquired skill and practice and isn't easily repeatable. Both are too heavily doomed to fail. Yes, you can repeat the cross. It's been written that Kordes repeated the cross which created Iceberg MANY times and nothing approaching as good a plant as Iceberg ever resulted. How are you going to know if your dream will work if your best chance of success doesn't work because you didn't do it at least well enough for it to have a chance? It's probably going to take you many generations to produce the type of goal you have in your mind's eye. Very often, what you'll see will be small changes at first, so keep a keen eye out for them. It will be interesting seeing how the health of the offspring vary, too. Keep in mind Ralph Moore's admonition..."Create a good plant first, it's always easy to hang a pretty flower on it later." You might also consider creating parallel breeding lines containing what you want to use, plus perhaps some of the better miniatures to help bring the size of the plants, ease of propagation and heavy, continuous repeat flowering back into the equation earlier? First generation hybrid vigor can quickly create some real monsters! For example, if you take a look at what is behind Fairy Moss, you'll find the seminal cross of Pinocchio (3' floribunda) with William Lobb (6'-8' moss) resulted in a 20' moss shrub, from observation of the remaining original plants which grew at Sequoia until its demise. One cross with a miniature tamed the beast to a miniature. Perhaps, if you created some Tea/mini and Alba/mini hybrids, crossing them may result in combining the traits you desire in better plants, more quickly and efficiently? Mr. Moore had discovered minis act like bridges from one section of the family to another, very often increasing the health, vigor, ease of propagation, intensifying flowering and other benefits, along the way. Stripes and moss exist in modern roses today because he was able to bring them out of the Old Garden Roses through miniatures and back into larger moderns. Every striped modern rose traces its origin back to Little Darling and Ferdinand Pichard. His various permutations of this cross, further enhanced by running them through his miniatures, mostly bred from R. Wichurana to improve health, vigor and ease of rooting, resulted in cleaning up many of Ferdinand Pichard's health and vigor issues. You can create similar breeders easily. Select those which have a solid reputation for health and fertility and begin creating hybrids of them with your selected Teas and Albas. Select your hybrids and begin breeding your selections. Engineer in the traits you desire from the foundation so they are more homogenized from the ground up, instead of losing half of them somewhere down the line when you find the need to include other genes to tame the plant, or improve the health, or introduce repeat flowering, etc. Because of moving from a more arid, disease free climate to more of the fog belt last year, I've recently had to rethink and re engineer my own breeder list to improve health. Very healthy, good minis are out there and they are easily obtained. It was never an issue where diseases aren't issues. It IS where they are. Yes, Linda, it is POSSIBLE for foreign pollen to be involved in a self set cross. It just hasn't been shown to be that PROBABLE. Species, wild roses, all have tremendous variation possible within their genes. There are cases of hybridization where they overlap. Species are far more fertile generally than garden roses. Very often, it's because they are single flowers, only one row of petals. That is all that exists naturally without human beings practicing "unnatural selection". Every time you increase a row of petals, you reduce a row of stamen and anthers, reducing fertility. Nature stacks the deck in her favor by not promoting double flowers for very long. They occur, but very seldom last where the single permutation is the more desirable for perpetuation of the species. When those natural hybrids occur, it's also where hundreds, if not thousands, of blooms of the same type are present so the insect pollinator or the wind, is so saturated with the same pollen, it occurs. That would very seldom occur in the average garden where so few of the same rose is grown. If you were a commercial grower, producing hundreds to thousands of the same plant en masse, perhaps. It was common for "breeders" to plant multiple varieties in the hole together in hopes there would be some cross pollination. But, when you read the old rose books and virtually everything raised from those methods was condemned as inferior and nearly synonymous to the originals, it's obvious very little, if any cross pollination occurred. Particularly with the Hybrid Perpetual class, they were sorted by "Types", not just because they grew like the archetype for the section, but very often because they were virtually identical, so if you grew the best, you knew the rest. Grow a bunch of self set seed from any of your garden roses and see what I mean. Most will greatly resemble what they were raised from and many will be inferior. Not all, but the vast majority. You will find variations, and the wider/wilder the cross which created the rose being used for seed was, the wider and wilder the variations will be. If you raise seed from a Hybrid Tea which contains nearly the same ancestors on both sides of its cross, you don't have much with which to work and most are going to come out inferior versions of the original. But, if you look at something like Cardinal Hume, which has a very wide variety of types and classes on both sides of his family tree (yes, some over lap and repetition, but much other different material there to stir things up), you can see why self set seed from him has created such a wide range of results, from dwarf versions to greatly differing colors and plant sizes. It CAN be possible to find interesting things in self set seed, but your best potential comes from roses with such diverse backgrounds, just as they mostly do from deliberate crosses. Trade organizations such as the AARS were officially originally created to prevent the importation and distribution of inferior roses, those similar to but inferior to what was already being sold here to prevent the destruction of the industry. Ellwanger and Foster-Mellier among others, attempted to perform those similar functions, to alert the reader that there was a lot of junk on the market. It has been a continuous problem from the earliest days of rose commerce, both here and abroad, and will continue to be as long as people are willing to take chances on the unknown. As long as you can chalk up the failures and money wasted to "at least I tried", you'll probably have fun. Once you hit the regret that you wasted the time, effort and money, then it's a problem. Fostering the business of providing inferior products and service by monetarily supporting it, voting with our dollars, does hurt everyone and the industry on the whole.

I'm glad I started this thread. I'm not sure that we got down to 40 degrees F here, but it definitely has been unusually cool and rainy for this time of year. Still, I'm researching this boron thing. In my original post I complained about RdV's issues. RdV has always had blooming issues,even with "normal" weather in my garden,except for that one great flush I got after giving it the cracked corn last year. Though I'm reluctant to do it again now because of the badger issue, that DOES give me hope,and also suggests that there is a nutritional issue. Another rose that has been bothering me a lot is Charles XII. The fact is that I've never yet managed to get a satisfying bloom flush from this rose,even though it is now in it's 4th or 5th season in my garden. Now, earlier , I was threatening Chas. with The Shovel,but now I think it'd be unfair to judge him on the basis of this year's spring, just because it really IS chilly (and Chas was bred in a warm climate, to boot). However I think it quite possible that there's some kind of nutritional issue with this rose, too. I know that it is planted in very, very poor soil. This area of my garden's "soil" was pure clay, very, very inert. Nothing was growing there when I started out. Chopping with my pick,I could see that this area consisted of the typical very "soft" rock that makes up a lot of my soil. Don't know what it's called, but I'm pretty sure that, once exposed to air and water, in time this stuff breaks down into clay. Good for water retention, but totally unfertile. It's quite possible that I just didn't amend it enough, or with the right stuff. The Climbing Old Blush that I have growing in similar soil has much more marked disease issues than other plants of the same rose growing elsewhere in my garden,and the tips of the shoots all suffer die-back . I've only just begun my on-line reading, but have already read that boron deficiency, for example, is thought to play a part in causing bull-heads and proliferation in roses. Chas. also has vegetative centers; not sure if this is the same as proliferation. Another oddity: the ends of the side shoots on the older canes show a sort of die-back. These canes all seem to be blind shoots, whilst younger ones produce buds...must study this more! I did try to go easy on the nitrogen this year with Charles,so I wouldn't THINK that excess nitrogen was the problem, but you never know...