To increase the selection efficiency for new cultivars in cut roses during breeding programs, phenotypes of seedlings in two cross combinations, C1 (Rosa hybrida ‘Yellow King’ x ‘Aladin’) and C2 (R. hybrida ‘Evelien’ x ‘Sunny Isle’), were investigated. Although most seedlings showed classic-type flower shapes, some (0.4% - 0.7%) had tomato-shaped flowers, especially at the young plant stage (6 months old). The variation in petal color was high, and pink and pink-mixed flowers were dominant, accounting for 72% in C1 and 76% in C2 at the mature plant stage (13-month-old plants). However, the seedlings had changes in the expression of petal color at different growth stages. The number of petals at the young plant stage had a strong positive correlation with those at the mature plant stage in C1 (r = 0.84***) and C2 (r = 0.73***). Sizes of flowers and petals increased with the growth of the seedlings, and their traits at the young plant stage had positive correlations with those at the mature plant stage in both C1 (r = 0.32***) and C2 (r = 0.39***). Prickle expression on stems was mostly in level 5 at the young plant stage and then dispersed to various classes at the mature plant stage, which increased the variation and coefficient of variation. To select seedlings for new cultivars through breeding processes, breeders should consider the growth stage for targeted traits.

Magnetic flux ropes, often observed during intervals of interplanetary coronal mass ejections, have long been recognized to be critical in space weather. In this work, we focus on magnetic flux rope structure but on a much smaller scale, and not necessarily related to interplanetary coronal mass ejections. Using near-Earth solar wind advanced composition explorer (ACE) observations from 1998 to 2016, we identified a total of 309 small-scale magnetic flux ropes (SMFRs). We compared the characteristics of identified SMFR events with those of normal magnetic cloud (MC) events available from the existing literature. First, most of the MCs and SMFRs have similar values of accompanying solar wind speed and proton densities. However, the average magnetic field intensity of SMFRs is weaker (~7.4 nT) than that of MCs (~10.6 nT). Also, the average duration time and expansion speed of SMFRs are ~2.5 hr and 2.6 km/s, respectively, both of which are smaller by a factor of ~10 than those of MCs. In addition, we examined the geoeffectiveness of SMFR events by checking their correlation with magnetic storms and substorms. Based on the criteria Sym-H < -50 nT (for identification of storm occurrence) and AL < -200 nT (for identification of substorm occurrence), we found that for 88 SMFR events (corresponding to 28.5 % of the total SMFR events), substorms occurred after the impact of SMFRs, implying a possible triggering of substorms by SMFRs. In contrast, we found only two SMFRs that triggered storms. We emphasize that, based on a much larger database than used in previous studies, all these previously known features are now firmly confirmed by the current work. Accordingly, the results emphasize the significance of SMFRs from the viewpoint of possible triggering of substorms.