Born in Lyon, Joseph Pernet was apprenticed to the nursery trade under his father, Joseph Pernet fils, at age 12. He was at the 1880 Horticultural Society of Lyon Meeting to hear Henry Bennett on the pedigree breeding of Hybrid Teas. At that time he was rose foreman to the widow of Antoine Ducher, a highly respected Lyon rose grower. She bred Cecile Brunner, introduced by Joseph in 1881 after her death.
In 1881, Joseph Pernet took over Mme Ducher’s interests in the nursery and shortly after married her daughter, Marie, assuming, as was the custom at the time, the name Pernet-Ducher.
He started a HT breeding program producing roses such as Mme Caroline Testout, Mme Abel Chatenay and Antoine Riveire, the latter generally presumed to be the parent of the Ophelia family.
Back in the 1880’s the dream was for a repeat-flowering, pure yellow rose. All agreed that pure yellow had to come from one of the species of which the finest yellow was (and is) rosa foetida (Austrian Yellow). The problem was, this rose was notoriously low in polen potency, so nothing was coming of it. Pernet-Ducher perservered and finally got some seedlings from Antoine Ducher, but the seedlings showed little promise and were once flowering.
He planted them out in a border as a curiosity and forgot them until a visitor asked to see them. To his delight, Joseph noticed a self-sown seedling bearing small double blooms of a distinct orange-yellow. He had stumbled on to a basic principle of plant genetics called “skip a generation”, and had also given the world its first repeat-flowering golden coloured rose. He named it Soliel d’Or. It was later classified as a new group of roses – the Pernetianas.
He continued his breeding program until the early 1920’s. Tw were named in memory of his sons, killed in action, but they never gained popularity and seem to have vanished. He also bred Rayon d’Or, an ancestor of Peace. He also bred two yellow climbers, but they held no interest for him so he did not register them. In 1923 he was induced to introduce one of them - La Reve as a competitor to Pemberton’s hybrid musks. It remained in a garden in Gloucestershire where it became known as Hidcote Yellow but was comparatively recently changed to Lawrence Johnston.
In ‘Modern Garden Roses’, Peter Harkness wrote “not only yellows, but also salmon, flame and apricot roses flowed from Pernet-Ducher’s nursery, earning him the well-deserved soubriquet, “The Wizard of Lyon””. Wilhelm Kordes I called him “The Grand Master. For all of you who love yellow roses, thank Joseph Pernet-Ducher for his persistence.
