From Sea Anemone to #Ashtag Flowers: a remarkable novelty story!

Breeder Interplant Roses comes up with a brand new product line ‘The #Ashtag Flowers!

The #Ashtag Flowers consist of an assortment of rose varieties with new distinctive qualities that have a beautiful, modern and elegant appearance, rich flowering, with a unique shape and carved/ruffled petals. The reactions from the international market are very positive.

Many of us do not know that developing a new rose variety takes decades for a rose breeder. We take you back to the year 1990 with the discovery in our garden rose trial field of a seedling with an unusual flower shape. This rose did not have smooth petals, it had ruffled edges. Although it did not show the ruffled pattern throughout the summer, we were interested to know whether this characteristic had a genetic basis or if it was just influenced by the weather. With the first seedling generation that we bred, our excitement was a little tempered. Only a few seedlings had some ruffles and it did not always show. We kept trying different parents and in our 1995 seedlings we found some exciting roses with ruffled flowers. Slowly but firmly the development of the ruffled shaped varieties became a major part of our breeding program. During the following years we worked on the stability of the ruffle characteristics.

In 2006 we were confident enough to introduce the ruffled flower shape in our cutflower program, starting with the spray roses. It took another few years to breed this flower shape into a suitable cutflower rose. In 2015 we selected a seedling with code T1090-15 among others. The following years we found out that people really liked this rose with its strange flowers, and in 2018 we decided to name this Ruffle Rose, ‘Sea Anemone’.

In 2018,  ‘Sea Anemone’ was released in Japan by our agent Keisei Rose Nurseries being a unique and innovative variety with beautiful bold ruffles. ‘Sea Anemone’ became a very hot topic in Japan as the forerunner of the current #Ashtag Flowers. ‘The innovative character of the Sea Anemone is a result of the constant passion and years of innovation as well as the corporate philosophy of Interplant and Keisei being ‘Roses, Dreams and Happiness to people all over the world’ says Mr Ryota Morokawa, being the President of Keisei Rose Nurseries. Finally, in 2019 we decided to name the ruffle shaped flowers #Ashtag Flowers. Now, in 2022, we are ready to show the world this fantastic new product! A few examples of recently introduced #Ashtag Flowers are #Wish and #Sofine.