Every Rose Begins as a Hip: Inside Our Breeding Glasshouses This Autumn

Walk into our breeding glasshouses in October and the colour hits you first. Rows of plants are studded with hips in every shade, from apple green to amber to deep, glossy red. It’s one of the most important moments in our year, because inside each of those hips could be the next great English rose.

As the light softens and the leaves turn, our breeders walk the aisles, checking every hip by eye and by hand. Colour is the clue. Green means not yet; a warm blush means it’s nearly time. Each variety ripens in its own way, with its own shape, size and shade, and knowing exactly when to pick comes only with years of experience.

“You can’t really put it into a rule,” says Carl. “After a few seasons you just start to read the hips. There’s a point where the colour deepens and they feel slightly softer in your hand, and you know that’s the moment.”

Earlier this year, our breeders chose pairs of parent roses and pollinated them by hand, many thousands of times over. Each pairing was chosen for the qualities they hoped to combine, perhaps one rose’s fragrance with another’s health or flower form. Every hip on these plants is the result of one of those matches.

Between now and November, we gather them one by one, snipping each hip from the plant along with its label. Every cross is recorded on our computer system, so we know exactly which two parents each hip came from, and that record follows every seed through its entire journey, from the glasshouse to, perhaps one day, your garden.

This is where the detective work begins. Each hip is opened and the seeds are extracted, cleaned, counted and sorted by cross. It’s painstaking, but it tells us a great deal: which pairings are setting plenty of seed, which are struggling, and which might be worth repeating next year.

“Opening a hip is a bit like opening a present,” Carl explains. “Some are packed with seed and some have hardly any, and that tells you a lot about how well a pairing has worked.”

Like siblings in a family, no two seeds are the same. Each one is a completely new rose that has never existed before.

Rose seeds won’t germinate straight away; they need to believe they’ve been through a winter first. So each batch is tucked into a small net bag, nestled into trays of damp compost and placed into cold storage. This process, called stratification, mimics the natural chill of the season and wakes the seeds up ready to grow.

In January, hundreds of thousands of these seeds will be sown in our greenhouses, and within weeks the first seedlings will appear. Then the long journey begins. Over twelve years, they’ll be assessed and trialled, first under glass and then out in the fields, for health, fragrance, flower form and how they cope with whatever the weather brings. Season by season, the numbers fall, until from all those thousands of beginnings just one or two are chosen.

Somewhere in those trays might be a rose with a scent no one has smelled before, or a colour we’ve never quite managed to capture. We won’t know for years. But every rose in your garden, from the much-loved Gertrude Jekyll^® to this year’s new Sir David Beckham began exactly here: as a hip, gathered by hand in autumn, full of promise.

“The seeds we’re sowing this winter won’t be in anyone’s garden for years,” says Carl. “But when a rose finally makes it all the way, and you see it growing by someone’s front door, that’s the best feeling in the world.”

Discover the full twelve-year journey in our breeding programme.