'First Impression' Proving To Be Quite Clean

This is a short departure from writing about the new Hulthemias, to write about an older seedling.  With this post, I wanted to highlight the disease resistance that I am seeing in a seedling from 6 years ago that has been named 'First Impression'.  'First Impression' is a dark yellow floribunda, introduced by Nor'East, and now carried by Greenheart Farms.  It has surprisingly good disease resistance - especially in our climate, but I am getting good reports from other areas of the country too.

The photo above was taken with my iPhone during a trip to Greenheart earlier this year.  I took a video of the plant (unfortunately after its peak bloom) to show its disease resistance in our non-sprayed rose garden.  Click here to see the video.  'First Impression' is the second rose in the video and has all of its foliage.  The first rose is heavily defoliated, while the third rose (actually a fairly clean rose too) has several leaves showing blackspot.  'First Impression' doesn't have a single blackspot on it.  For those interested in breeding yellow roses, I would suggest using this one.  There haven't been a lot of hips on 'First Impression' in my experience, but for some reason, most of our roses have produced an abundance of OP hips this year including 'First Impression.  I would mainly use it as a pollen parent, but who knows, maybe you could also get lucky and get good hips on it too!

'First Impression' came from a cross of [('Lynn Anderson' X 'Tournament of Roses') X 'Hot Tamale'] X ('Stainless Steel' X 'Baby Love').  Other than from 'Baby Love', I am not sure where it is getting its good disease resistance.