What determines whether a cultivated rose will be a climber or not? Is it the rootstock? I ask this because I have two types of Arthur Bell. One is a vigorous climber and the other is a bush type.
This is my understanding...You can take cuttings from roses and grow them as own root, and the rose will be true to form. The root stocks are used because nurseries can quickly produce many roses by grafting the buds on to vigorous root stocks. This leads me to think the climbing or non climbing tendencies are in the DNA of the grafted/budded plant, not the rootstock. For example, David Austin uses the climbing rose Dr. Huey (in the US, I’m not sure about the UK) as root stock for all of their non-own root roses as it is very vigorous, but the characteristics of the rootstock rose are not passed on to the budded rose. I’m thinking regarding Arthur Bell, it may have sported to have climbing or non climbing tendencies (I don’t know which came first), which they then propagated from.
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