Pinnate

In the margins of the festivities noticed yesterday at reference 1, I took a snap of one of the roses on our back patio, a species rose from Wisley.

Eventually I remembered that the point of the snap was that the leaves appeared to be firmly odd pinnate, with a penchant for five leaflets to the stem.

But I could not remember its name. Search of the archive turned up reference 2. Search of the Wisley shop turned up nothing, apart from plenty of whimsical names of generally the right sort.

While Google Images (GI) scored a bullseye: there are a lot of roses out there and he did not have much to go on - with the snap I gave him having been lifted from reference 2: 'Tottering by Gently' from David Austin. The clue about it being a pot rose from Wisley seems to have got lost, so perhaps it never made it. I remembered the name well enough when told, while BH could tell me all about the magazine side of things before I told her. For which last see references 3 and 4.

Contrariwise, the string 'tottering' does not appear in the archive, very suggestive that the name, as opposed to the purchase, was never noticed.

I learn that there is lots of stuff about this sort of thing out there on Facebook, and to a lesser extent Reddit. Plenty of people out there generating images and text for GI to train on. Some of these people will be careless, but maybe the learning process can ride over a certain amount of noise. An advantage of being statistical rather than analytical?

Looking at the plant this morning, five did not seem so very dominant - in the way that it is with the aggressive, first year shoots of the blackberry - and I could not make much sense of the stem structure at all. I took some more snaps, one of which is included above. Which I fed to GI, with the clue 'Rose 'Tottering by Gently'. It seems to be odd pinnate, with a penchant for five leaflets, but looking at it more closely, I can't make much sense of the leaf & shoot structure, with flower shoots popping out all over the place'.

Part of his reply is snapped above. So maybe what we have is lots of excitable axil buds. With the snag that the two references given for the 'result' tiret were not much help. One was elementary and one was advanced and I so far fail to see the relevance of either.

The start of a second bite at the cherry. I thought a slightly better story. But not sure whether I was using regular Google or Google Images - or indeed if they are very different these days.

I managed to get in a muddle when I started GI on the three and five leaflets of the blackberry, using this image from Rosebery Park, snapped for what I thought was the odd leaf shapes for a blackberry. A failure to take proper notes. 

That apart, all to do with the ability of the blackberry to vary the shape and size of its leaves and the organisation of its shoots according to context. GI also noted the distinctive purple colouring of the first year cane, that is to say the one with groups of five leaflets.

There was also talk of the shape of blackberry leaves (rounded bases) compared with that of rose leaves (more pointed bases). I was not convinced that GI was not telling me what he thought I ought to see, rather than what the images I had given him actually did look like.

Zomlefer (reference 5) offers a drawing of a rose shoot, Rosa palustris (reference 7), looking rather like the blackberry shoots three and five (reference 6 and elsewhere). In which connection, GI suggests that, by some sort of chemical signalling, the flowering shoots reduce input into leaves so as to leave more for the flower.

So all a bit inconclusive so far. Maybe I need to take a cutting from our pot rose and look at it more carefully.

But I have learned that thorns are different from prickles. Thorns are a degenerate branch or stem, while prickles are more a pimple on the skin; the two being quite different from a development point of view. This rose does prickles.

Conclusions

Off to a flying start, but then things got more wobbly, at least for this amateur botanist.

I think the important takeaway is that, if the objective is to test GI on material of this sort, one needs to take a lot more care than I did on this occasion.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/birthdays-special.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/flower-power.html. Which dates the purchase to after October 2021. With this previous investigation getting no further.

Reference 3: https://www.davidaustinroses.co.uk/products/tottering-by-gently.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Tempest.

Reference 5: Guide to flowering plant families - Wendy B. Zomlefer - 1994. University of North Carolina Press.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/modigliani.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_palustris. The swamp rose of eastern North America. A thin entry, but not much more at RHS.

Reference 8: The anatomy of rose shoots - Marina Pashina - 2021. The advanced reference of elusive relevance. The start of it is included above.

Group search key: aisk, GIchat-20260823-01.