Stripes aren't for everyone, but they are tremendously serendipitious, which fascinates me, always has. That and moss roses, which is why Ralph Moore and Paul Barden selected the rose they did to name for me. The lack of a stated parentage is what led Ralph Moore to explore Ferdinand Pichard for stripes. Everything else said what it was a sport of, not Ferdinand. He may have been correct that it resulted from a seedling as every striped modern rose with stated parentage resulted from his seminal Little Darling X Ferdinand Pichard cross. I find no record of anyone else having created stripes "from thin air", so I would comfortably suggest that all modern stripes, if their breeding was known, could be traced back to his 1969 seedling.

Just as stripes aren't for everyone, neither are singles or minis, but they all play their part. There would be no modern stripes, modern crested hybrids, many modern species hybrids, including the garden-worthy Hulthemia hybrids, without Ralph Moore's miniatures. They have acted as bridges between stubborn types and other larger roses, carrying the desired traits from their beginnings to our gardens. Much has been accomplished because of them. Singles can have an amazing elegance to them, particularly the early, single Hybrid Teas. Cecil remains in my garden because of its elegance and ease of growth. It's one of the most satisfying yellow roses I have discovered. I wrote that nearly twenty-five years ago and continue feeling that way about it, today.

Yes, some of them are extremely unstable, but then so are a number of solid colored sports. Look at all of them out of Frisco, the florist rose which eventually generated Abracadabra, Hocus Pocus and Simsalabim. That thing has mutated constantly. It's much more unstable than Ophelia, Columbia or the Radiance clan. Yes, The Queen Alexandra and Fiesta were around half a century ago. That would have been in the sixties and early seventies, when Armstrong Nurseries still listed OGRs and older moderns in their mail order catalogs. You could buy HPs, Damasks, Centifolias, Teas, Noisettes, Chinas and all other sorts of fun things from Armstrong and other majors right from their catalogs. Many were offered as body bags and true bare roots at garden centers, too! Then, as these older roses filtered out of the majors, there was always Roses of Yesterday and Today. The middle of the Twentieth Century saw a tremendous selection of all types and vintages of roses available here in the US. It wasn't until the eighties very little (in comparison) remained available. It's been very cyclical. Every twenty-five to thirty years, selection swells then shrinks, hopefully to swell again. By the late 80s, a few years after I began to really get going with roses, the selection and number of nurseries willing to offer these roses, began another swell, peaking in the early 21st Century. We're now in the contraction again, which is painful and frightening to witness. Hopefully, in a decade or so, there will still be things remaining in gardens and enough of us who remember them, to get the expansion going again. One can only pray.