I have rooted Fortuniana using the wrapping method detailed on my blog. It requires HEAT to root. In Encino, Zone 10a, I could wrap and root it like mad. In Santa Maria, a cold Zone 9b, it won't root, period, so I gave my plant of it away to Grace Flower Farm in Santa Ynez where it is HOT. Chip budding to Fortuniana is easy, but the buds also demand HEAT to push. In Encino, where the last "winter" we spent there was an average temperature of nearly 80, they pushed like crazy. Here? Pfft. Nothing. They all sat and turned black. What is the source of your Fortuniana budded plant? Hopefully the source can shed some light on what to expect as far as RMV is concerned.

Thank you so much, Kim! I’ve been wanting to try your wrapping method, but wasn’t sure if that would work for Fortuniana. I might need to wait until late fall/early winter here to keep them at the right temp, but this sounds very encouraging!

The rose was a no-tag clearance plant from a local nursery, but is in a blue pot, which usually means Nelson’s around here. :-)

You're welcome! I haven't found a rose type wrapping didn't have SOME success with. Very prickly species such as Fedtschenkoana aren't all that happy with it, but those used for stocks are perfect. If you read the initial post about wrapping, you'll learn that an Australian nurseryman discovered it when he was storing his Fortuniana sticks he rooted for stocks. They callused so he just jammed them into the ground to finish rooting. As long as you can hold them at the appropriate temperatures, they should callus and begin rooting for you. I'm not familiar with Nelson's. Hopefully, they only produce newer things on clean stocks to prevent virus spread.

I’m really excited about trying this...I’ll update with my progress. I’m going to do some bundles of other roses while I’m at it. I need to give my Crepsecule a hard whacking back, so I’ll have a lot of material and possibly some from my Mrs. BR Cant. Thanks again! :-)

Good luck! I'm excited to hear how it works for you and how your budding works out. You can also find posts about chip budding if it helps augment all the other tutorials on line.

We root it in an intermittent mist system year-round, with well over 90% success, and often 95%. We use an 8-10 inch cutting, leaving a minimum of 2 leaves at the top, but preferably more (often 6). We wound the base by cutting (usually 2) thin bark strips, perhaps 1/2-3/4" long from the sides of the base, dip in a rooting hormone -- usually Dip-N-Grow at 1 part to 6 or 7 parts water, and then pot them in 2x2x6" "band" pots with a peat/perlite potting mix.

I believe the real key to rooting it is to use the brightest possible light. Our mist system has no roof or shading, so the cuttings are under full, unfiltered noon-time sun. they love it. 400+ rooted so far this year, for the year's grafting needs.

I like to use cuttings from the huge, long basal breaks that it makes in June and July -- they are nice and straight, relatively thick, and often completely thornless, so they make great rootstock stems, without a lot of fiddling with them.

I have tried rooting Fortuniana suckers several times , but they just die in a few weeks .

Well, budding I’m more nervous about, but I did graft some apples, so I have a rudimentary understanding. My garden is making tons of material for me now, so I can afford to play around with it and see what happens. :-)

Thank you, Dr. Manners...very interesting about the full sun. Do you think the misting combined with that exposure makes it work? Is that year-round?

Sounds like Fortuniana is a true FL rose—loves heat and humidity! :-)

I tried some prunings before in bottles, along with about 40 other sacrificial cuttings, and it didn’t work for me then, either, pink rose. Crossing fingers this time! :-)

Good luck , Perma. I tried to do cuttings too but it always failed on me. It goes into a limp always and within days I know it is a big flop. Next thing I know it is gone to sky.

Fortuniana grows pretty big here. ( I am pretty sure it does ) I don't think I have that kind of space. I wonder if anyone has a mature full shot pic of the bush ? That will be interesting to see.

jin

Perma, the advantage of the mist is that it allows for full sun. Any other method of keeping the cuttings damp enough would require some shading as well, to prevent overheating. Under the mist, the cutting stays a bit below ambient temperature, even in the hottest sun.

Kim that is awesome sounds really fascinating and doing work the old ways. I did the misting several times by hand but the cuttings just flop. Here is a question . How often do you mist since it is always so hot here 90's above temp and nights are are nearly 80 ? So, how often do I mist ??
Big garden places has auto misting but I try to do bottle mist.

jin

By hand? I have no idea. It would seem that would be a full time job, though. The old mister at The Huntington was the size of a double bed. It was a raised table full of perlite, or at least with a rather thick layer of it, in which was buried a heating cable an inch or so beneath the surface. There was an approximately 18" tall riser about one foot in from each side in each of the four corners with a fog head on top. There were two timers. One was a supposedly connected to a solar cell so the thing only operated when the sun was out. The other was a one minute timer. The mister fogged ten seconds every minute of sunlight daily.

The table sat inside a lath house. It was open above it and to the south of it with a green house about fifteen or so feet away from the south side of that lath house. The east side of the table had a lath wall about five feet from it. The other sides were open to the inside of the lath house. The winds would often come in from the south, blowing the mist/fog from the table to the north side, inside the lath house. We would check the pots in the mister weekly and repot those which had rooted into their potting mix into individual four inch pots, which were individually labeled and set in nursery flats on the ground to the north side of the table where the mist would be blown over them. The combination of the reduced, but still present, mist and filtered light through the lath top helped harden them off during the summer heat. The ground inside the lath house and outside it was covered with pea gravel. There was an asphalt paved road about five feet in front of the lath house which ran from behind the Tea Room, in front of where the Botanical trailers were at the time, behind the Virginia Scott Steele Gallery and out to where the newer Botanical Pavilion is now.

There was always a surface film of water on the cuttings so they never dried out. The mister mix was half coarse perlite and half builders sand so it drained very rapidly yet remained damp. We used traditional green, four inch square plastic pots in the mister. As long as it remained warm to hot, under that set up, most roses rooted in seven to ten days. There were cuttings which hadn't rooted by the time the end of the season arrived, so we were allowed to put them inside one of the orchid green houses. They were in there over "winter". That batch of cuttings took between three and four MONTHS to root. Remarkable the effect heat has, isn't it?

That is quite remarkable. Thank you for your very detailed descriptions, too. Do you think bottom heat makes the difference, or all-around air heat?

(BTW, Kim, have you thought about authoring a book? You are excellent at explaining clearly and so patiently!) :-)

Thank you. Oh, yes ma'am, it's documented in many sources that an approximately 70F bottom heat aids in propagation. It isn't required, but if possible, it does help. Thank you, but authoring a book requires significantly greater degree of organized thought than I possess. Ask a question and, as jimofshermanoaks used to claim, "it flows through you like poop through a goose". Tell me to write something and we're both going to be sitting there for quite some time.... Besides, I've already had my foray into the "publishing world", years ago with a collection of articles I had written. One weekend, I spoke at The Heritage Rose Garden in San Jose on Saturday, then the next day, I spoke at The Homestead Acre in Chatsworth Park South. We sold my "book" at both events for the benefit of the two venues. It was a fun and tiring weekend!

Is there anywhere one can access those articles?

Some have been in theHelp Me Find EZine, for years. They covered a wide range of rose subjects. At the time, very little information was available about such topics as striped HT sports; Micro Minis; Single Hybrid Teas; "Coffee Roses"; Dr. Buck's Stippled Roses, so I collected every one available in the US and Canada, grew and studied them, then wrote about them. A number were written for The Potpourri of Roses, the newsletter of The Huntington Library Rose Garden Volunteer Newsletter and then reprinted in Peter Schneider's Akron Rose Rambler and later in his American Rose Rambler and various other rose society newsletters. Some documented the rediscovery of roses such as "Now, You are My Sunshine" and "My Flame of Love". Some dealt with specific roses like Ellen Willmott and Symphony, the HP. "Halos" concerned Ralph Moore's Halo Roses, his motivation and method of creating them. "Halo Roots" dealt with Jack Harkness' original breeding of the Hulthemia hybrids. One of the neatest results of any of them was Mr. Harkness writing to express his appreciation for my "telling his story". Years later, when his brother, Peter, accepted his Great Rosarians of the World for Harkness Roses, I introduced myself to him to express my appreciation for his and his family's contributions to the "rose world", he floored me by recognizing my name and remembering the article and his brother's and my correspondence. It has been a very "fun ride"!

What a amazing stories. I've read all the ezines and have found them so useful and well-written. Thank you for sharing them. I'm not surprised your piece was a topic of conversation among the Harkness; such a beautiful memory!

Thank you! I'm delighted you enjoyed!