Screening Landscape Roses for Salinity Tolerance

Abstract

Given the regularity of periods of drought in the southwestern U.S., concern over an ample supply of high quality water is always an issue. With a diminishing water supply, higher quality water will likely be diverted to higher priority uses; therefore, concern arises over the availability and quality of water for landscape use. This project was designed to screen representative cultivars from several of the major garden rose categories (China, Tea, Polyantha, Hybrid Tea, and Found Roses) for tolerance to saline irrigation water. Roses were placed in a completely randomized design with four replications in a container holding area. Salinity treatments were designed to be a 2:1 molar ratio of NaCl:CaCl 2 . The treatments consisted of 0, 6.25, 12.5, 25, and 50 mmol NaCl. The volume of solution applied to each treatment was adjusted at every irrigation event to meet ET and produce a 30% leaching-fraction. At the conclusion of the study, the China rose retained the best foliage while one of the hybrid tea roses maintained flowering throughout the study at all treatment levels. It appears that the roses with the smallest leaflets were able to tolerate salinity better than those with larger leaflets. Results of the tissue sample, leachate, spad and media analyses will also be presented.

Abstract from the paper’s OpenAlex record, shown for indexing and research. Copyright remains with the authors or the publisher. Read at the source ↗

The text the model read, with the source record’s inline markup (italics, sub- and superscripts) rendered and its character entities decoded; quote offsets refer to the raw text.