Jerry Twomey is not your average rose breeder. And he doesn’t breed your average roses. Considered something of a maverick by some in the rose world and an unrecognized genius by others, Twomey is taken lightly by no one. He came to roses late in life, not beginning a serious study of roses until he'd retired from a successful career as a plant breeder and seedsman in the world of agriculture.

From the beginning, Twomey was a contrarian. With everyone in the world of rose breeding going one way, Twomey was one of the few who dreamed of success in a completely different direction. With the Dream™ Rose collection of Twomey hybrids slated for its world debut release in the U.S. in spring 2000, it would seem that dream is about to be fulfilled.

Twomey, still vital and energetic in his eighties, recently sat down with internationally-known rosarian and garden writer Sean McCann. They talked about Twomey’s new Dream™ Roses, which were selected to be the second line of roses introduced by Anthony Tesselaar, the man who introduced the extremely popular Flower Carpet® line of roses to U.S. gardeners. Anthony Tesselaar International will introduce Dream™ Roses nationwide in the spring of 2000.

McCANN: I’ve had the pleasure of test-growing your Dream™ Roses. They are consistent free bloomers and take a lot of abuse.

TWOMEY: They are a long way ahead of the standard garden tea roses on the market today. Gardeners shouldn’t have to be told that they must spray their roses every seven days for success. They need to be able to enjoy the beauty of the blooms and bushes with minimal attention.

These roses can be grown successfully with a very modest degree of care, no fancy pruning, just a chop with the hedge clippers is enough, and they only need a minimal amount of spraying. They’re not perfect, but they are good. We don’t claim complete immunity from disease, we’re not there yet, no one is – but these are the survivors of years of searching for better roses.

McCANN:I was impressed that the roses are also surprisingly early coming into flower.

TWOMEY: 'Dream Red' is a great rose...a better red than ‘Trumpeter’ which is in its breeding and which is among the top roses on the market today. 'Dream Orange' is good in the garden. The flower individually lasts for over two weeks and stays as clean as a whistle. 'Dream Yellow' is fragrant and the best of that color that I could find anywhere. 'Dream Pink' has a lot of real perfume, is long lasting with a huge very attractive bloom that is always perfect.

'Dream Red' is generally the first one to flower in the garden; the orange and the yellow follow on very quickly after these, then the pink. If you are in the business of selling pot roses in bloom this is very important. Gardeners want annuals bred for early blooming so they can see the flower they are buying. Dream™ Roses allow gardeners this same ‘early viewing’ at retail. The red, orange and yellow roses will bloom first and will go on continuously flowering until the first freeze-up. Then a little later comes the pink, with the same free-flowering nature - with massive blooms and perfume.

McCANN: What was your aim when you began breeding roses?

TWOMEY: A rose for every garden: with great blooms, good foliage, great color over a long period with very little maintenance. I wanted to produce the rose that is virtually trouble free, what I like to call “the universal rose”...a rose that can grow anywhere in the world, with wide adaptability, a minimum of trouble - one that would flower outdoors with the ease of a rose in a greenhouse. I wanted to continue the line of the great tea roses with shape, color, and, substance, with a compact bush and I wanted to add in hardiness and disease resistance. This has not been achieved by traditional rose breeding.

I sought to breed roses that could bring back the power of the very earliest types – the hybrid varieties with species in their breeding or the species themselves, which people know as the original or wild roses. These would give health as well as great rooting ability. To these I added greenhouse roses – the ones that excel as commercial cut flowers – to gain their attributes for short day blooming and then added English varieties so that the roses would do well under cool conditions. These provided my base for breeding material and in tests they have done very well in the various climatic conditions of the United States. That is what makes it a universal rose for me.

McCANN: In finding the parents for your roses where did you start?

TWOMEY: I had a friend in California, Lawrence Smith, and we talked about this. He said that the best rose for many years was ‘Silver Jubilee’, a rose bred in Scotland by Alex Cocker. It had not made any inroads into American gardens because people – mainly those who wanted to show roses - said that it was short stemmed. However, for us, it was a beautiful piece of plant breeding, building right from the most valuable species roses on up. It was no accident.

After that I became aware of two very good, under-rated, American-bred roses, ‘White Masterpiece’ and ‘Evening Star’. I brought these into my breeding lines and followed them with greenhouse roses like ‘Sonia’ and ‘Royalty’ and some others.

Then good fortune came my way. I discovered ‘Gitte’, a rose bred by the German master house of Kordes. Here was another rose that was not being considered by American breeders, yet it was a grab-bag of every great rose in recent years. In its parentage you find ‘Fragrant Cloud’, ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Dr. A.J. Verhage’, ‘Colour Wonder’ and ‘Zorina’ which goes back to invaluable early American hybridizing.

These then were the basic line of my breeding. It was where lots of study really paid off.

McCANN: You call these roses “survivors” - how did they get that name?

TWOMEY: We used the word survivors because they continued to grow well after six years with no spray at all in test sites that were the toughest and most disease-ridden I could find. They survived for those years on a piece of land that is at times wet, cold, burning hot, dry as dust and totally inappropriate for growing roses. I wanted these roses to be thoroughly tested in every possible way.

The field in mid-California where I grew them was as hard as concrete, badly watered, you couldn’t tell how a plant would grow. I watched disease and pests and weeds all killing my rose selections in that field. I did nothing to stop it. No spraying, no care of any sort. I have been through every problem – we had white fly that killed some roses...the same sort of problem that seemed to have ruined California agriculture a few years ago...and every other problem.

Eventually I was down to just a few of my varieties that grew among huge areas of disaster and shrugged off all the troubles that nature threw at them. And when nature didn’t hit them with a particular problem I brought diseased plants into the field to plant amongst them. No one will say that all roses are going to withstand all diseases forever. But, from the experience in my field, these roses deserve to be called survivors!

McCANN: What sort of rose diseases did you have to fight?

TWOMEY: Black spot is tough, very tough, and there are about five strains of black spot in the USA all hitting varieties differently.

Other strains are mutating all the time. It is a perpetual fight that will only be licked with good husbandry; good organic matter in the soil; minor elements in the fertilizer, leaf feeding. Roses, to be a success, must be kept healthy. But they have to be good roses first of all. And that is where I expect the Dream™ Roses to come in. There are other diseases too. Downy mildew, which we have had now for five years, is worse than black spot. Then there’s rust, which also mutates.

This is why you need to breed in the direction we are breeding Dream™ Roses. To have healthier plants. Because in the end, spraying isn’t helping. The more you try to control any disease with spraying the more you are killing off only certain strains of the disease. You can spray and you then leave what you think is a clean leaf but there is usually one spore remaining and it will multiply enormously. That needs fairly constant observation. That’s why the future lies in hardier plants, not more and more spraying.

McCANN: What else have your learned about roses in your quarter of a century breeding them?

TWOMEY: Good culture really pays off. Some eight-year-old plants that I had of one variety were having a bad time but we dug up the old bushes and gave them better growing conditions and that really did work. It produced a fine head of blooms – and a renewed bush.

McCANN: These roses are good, but they’re not perfect. What is your response to someone whose Dream™ Roses show signs of disease?

TWOMEY: I am not making any claims for complete disease resistance, resistance doesn’t mean immunity. What I claim is that these roses have survived my tests over the years. While other plants died within a year or so, and others took years to show any suggestion of disease, these roses are the survivors. During the years diseases killed off most of the roses all around them, they survived. Some had symptoms one year, but came back readily the next. And, as I said, diseases do mutate. All even the best breeder can do is to give gardeners the very best roses of his time.

McCANN: What do you watch for in a new seedling?

TWOMEY: Oh, lots of things but one important presence is that of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that traps the energy for good growth. Chlorophyll in the guard petals means that blooms open slower – the greenhouse growers are now catching on to this fact.

I learned this many years ago from peonies. Lord, as a kid I used to go to shows in Winnipeg. Eatons, the big store in Canada, used to pay for the horticultural show to be put on in their foyer. For a number of years running I used to cut 10,000 peony blooms from University Fields, we put them in big hampers and took them to the Eaton’s annex. The perfume on that was something else. Both peonies and lilacs do wonderfully well in the calcium, cold soil in that area. We had some great varieties then - ‘Sarah Bernhard’ was a top one but ‘Solange’ was the great one. That those blooms opened in those conditions was thanks to the green tinge of the chlorophyll on a bloom.

I picked up the same coming through the roses which came from famous greenhouse varieties like the dark red ‘Royalty’ and some others – I got three lines of parentage coming out of it and this is turning out to be the best. It is also very important for a rose to drop its petals cleanly after blooming and not to set a seed head. Sterile roses don’t get diseased so easily because they stay young. But also, roses that stay in the “youth cycle” will flower repeatedly all season long.

Basically, you get two stages in plants – youth and middle age. The minute they pollinate they are into middle age. They start laying down sugars and starches so that the seed they set will be fertile. If you avoid the middle age stage, the plants will continue to flower. Also, you don’t get any disease of any consequence until after they have pollinated, until the mature stage. But if they are sterile and don’t pollinate, they stay in the youthful cycle. I have bred Dream™ Roses to remain in that cycle. They are selected to be repeat bloomers.

McCANN: Did you do all your selecting of the roses in the fields or did you have some other method of sorting them out?

TWOMEY: Oh, hell, no. There was a lot more in it than that. For instance I would cut the selected blooms, put them into small tubes and take them home. Then I would line them all up on the dining room table and watch them. I learned more watching those roses behaving on the table than most people do in years of watching them elsewhere.

Would they take up water? One didn’t take up any, others would drink it all dry. The greedy ones were the ones that would not ship well for the cut flower trade so were not much use to the greenhouse growers. Then I started looking for pockets and spurs on blooms like you find in the begonia flowers; lacinations, indentations and ruffling. And, of course, substance. Then I watched how the petals fell - some lasted for two weeks, some with hardly a sign of diminishing. There was a lot to learn on that table.

McCANN: So how would you sum up your breeding efforts?

TWOMEY: I want to give the gardener the flower that I feel is needed. A beautiful rose that is a hybrid tea (those big and wonderful blooms) on a head with clusters of flowers so that they will go on flowering over a very long time. This way the gardener will have color for a long period. And the garden is for color. I wanted an easy-care rose, that doesn’t need a lot of fuss. I wanted a good garden rose. Every garden needs a rose - now the Dream™ Roses will make this possible.