Roses can divide flower growers

By Dean Fosdick

Hybridizers are making things even more appealing for many gardeners.

NEW MARKET, Va. — If you’ve ever strayed into a spat between flower growers, chances are it was about roses.

“Queens of the garden,” puffs a supporter.

“Demanding divas,” huffs a detractor.

There are few wider attitudinal divides in gardening.

I didn’t have a single rose on my property as recently as three years ago, and that was emphatically by choice. I considered them too much work.

Now I have dozens of the ever-blooming varieties thriving in sun and partial shade, performing brilliantly on a hillside for erosion control, bidding a cheerful welcome along a quiet country lane and enhancing the looks of a split rail fence.

I became a believer after being invited to try out a few members of the Knockout family, one of the hardy new shrubs beginning to dominate the rose market. Later arrivals included several Flower Carpet selections — durable, low-growing bushes with glossy green foliage. The upright Knockouts and the aptly named Flower Carpets provide stunning, blossom-bedecked groupings when intermingled.

There was nothing especially challenging about growing these robust perennials, even for a rose rookie like me.

Every bare-root bush was producing color within five to six weeks. It was simply a matter of watering deeply and frequently until they became established. Beyond that, they need pruning only once a year, a single feeding in the spring and timely soakings with a garden hose.

What demanding divas? Count me among the converted.

Now the rose hybridizers are making things even more appealing for the many gardeners designing their yards around the low maintenance plants.

“Over the next few seasons, we will be doing a great body of work on the genetics of roses that are proving particularly drought tolerant,” said Rod Thorpe, chief executive officer for Anthony Tesselaar International, based in Silvan, Australia.

“There’s been an increasing impact from drought — particularly across much of Australia, the south of France and in the American Southeast and Southwest,” Thorpe said.

“We see drought tolerance as a trait that’s becoming more and more important for roses, which traditionally have been thirsty plants.”

Some of the newer, re-blooming varieties also are displaying good salt endurance, he said. “We’ve been planting them on banks beside roads that have been regularly salted. Other roses have not survived, but the Flower Carpet has made it.”

An enticing aroma is one of a rose’s most desirable qualities, but not all varieties are able to produce it.

“Up to now, fragrant roses were not very disease hardy,” Thorpe said. “We very well may be coming up with a solution to that.”