Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Celebrate Roses

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalProv Gardening Expert

My love is like a red, red, rose. Since before time people pause, inhale, and admire roses. Emotions well up, time stretches far behind and presents us with divine scent, noble colors, and the eternal paradox of bloom and thorn. Roses are companions to humans. Found in pyramids and cave burials, our love affair with this large family of plants does not diminish. Rather, each year brings us ever more carefully bred varieties. Do not be puzzled or confused. There are few wrong answers among the roses, gardeners of every experience succeed with roses. You can too. 

Pressed for space?

Often urban gardeners are pressed for space. Our focus may be nutritious foods free from pesticides and herbicides. Our nation of transitory people discourages planting anything beyond a single season or two. I urge you to consider the larger role plants play in our lives, our emotions, our legacy and community. Roses’ auditions for the part and wins the starring lead. They announce the advent of summer, of those hot days when gardeners avoid the midday sun and hordes abandon cities for cooler beaches and forests. The roses remain at home, valiantly face the sun and throw caution to the wind. Their fragrance soothes the savage beast, colors in every shade of red, white, yellow, dominate the garden. Beyond the primary colors one can find purple, bi-colors, and shades to please every eye. They offer bloom the first year and often live for decades. Why not? 

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A good place

A good place to start is to visit the many outstanding rose gardens in our cities, often laid out in carefully designed walks and views, best of all are those with labeled plants. Don’t stall at the plethora of choices; this is not a limited value system of right or wrong. A few guidelines work for all roses and they will work for you. Remember, gardening offers lots of personal expression. For me, I favor fragrance in the garden and look for roses with scent. Moreover, I have limited space and hope for a long blooming season, alas I do not have space for those roses that bloom during a couple weeks and lustily zoom up and outward forever. Everyone has favorite colors, I keep hummingbirds in mind who are attracted to red and yellow in gardens. Yet few colors appeal to me as much as pink in all its variations and roses offer the finest pinks known to gardens. With these values in mind: scent, color, blooming period, and space, I find plenty of roses to cultivate. 

Roses benefit

Roses benefit from highly selective breeding and judgement. No worries my friends. All roses offer their showiest blooms in June. Floribunda roses will bloom right through the hardest frost. Roses are also classed by height, there are low miniature roses of bonsai stature and upwards into the climbing and rambling rose section. Like most gardeners I cultivate a combination of floribunda, bush and climbing roses. The floribundas offer abundant continuous bloom, miniature roses enchant, climbers fill those tight spots where the open space is vertical.  There is one common denominator for all roses. They are sun lovers and must have most of the day in sunshine. Shade is their nemesis. 

Abandon hopeless ideals

Abandon all hopeless ideals and plant a rose bush. Stop fussing. Prepare ordinary garden soil, probably enriched by compost and mulch if you practice organic or bio-dynamic techniques. Soggy soil challenges most gardeners and defeats roses. In fact, roses are tough plants that fight back. Dense thickets of roses stop pets and children from wandering. A classic planting scheme is to form hedges and limit access points, few return for another tussle with thorns. The constant gardener knows these things and wears gloves when among the roses. Only the nose and eyes are uncovered, for the pleasure of scent and form.  Your rose plant benefits from bone meal to boost root development. Remove your scion from its packaging and soak in a bucket of water as you loosen soil, move other sun loving plants to make room and envision what your rosebush will eventually become, either tall, a full bush or almost dwarf. Plant your rose into a sunny spot with well drained fertile soil. They do well in fair to middling soil and only become more vibrant as soil fertility increases. 

Roses usually have long lives

Roses usually have long lives. Choose a rose that is naturally resistant to insects and disease. Wash away aphids with this very effective insecticide: soak tobacco of any kind in water and spray. Nicotine is poisonous to virtually all insects and soon degrades or washes off. Apply as needed. Pick off Japanese beetles into an old can filled with water and a few tablespoons of any vegetable oil. Empty the can on the compost or pull back some nearby mulch and pour onto the soil and recover. Accept a low level of damage as the price of equilibrium in the garden eco-system. Healthy plants are naturally resistant to most maladies. Focus upon the soil as chief source of nutrients to maintain plants in tip top health. Seaweed in my region is tucked closely around the rose stems year round but hay, shredded leaves, and other bio-degradable mulches are beneficial. A layer of brown paper bag under the mulch inhibits virtually any volunteers or weeds. And yet, one comes across those stalwarts we treasure, the roses planted generations ago by nameless others, nameless but far from forgotten gardeners who voted to present loveliness to the future. Some roses endure in vacant urban lots among foundation stones or cellar pits, the only trace of a lovely spring day once long ago. Many of the roses that reach over New England’s stone walls are direct descendants of the roses that arrived with the Pilgrims. 

Guarantee rose scent

Guarantee rose scent among the rose bushes and plant rose scented geraniums at their feet. Rose scented geraniums; especially “Attar of Roses” offers intense rose fragrance. Easily started from cuttings, I keep a “mother” plant over the winter on a windowsill, rose scented geraniums thrive under the same conditions as roses. The scented geraniums are godsends for urban gardeners who seek fragrance in the small garden. Rose scent is the classic and I plant rooted cuttings next to the rose bushes. Rose is not the only fragrance in the geranium family, lemon, pineapple, orange, lime, nutmeg and cinnamon are common, specialized nurseries are likely to offer the collector more elusive scents. All do well in sunshine and better yet, the geraniums will tolerate a bit more shade than roses. 

Scented geraniums

Roses and scented geraniums are fine for container gardeners. Give your rose as much pot as possible, mainly to prevent the soil from drought. Very large pots can be moved with a hand truck and brought under shelter for the winter, simply water once in a while and protect from wind and storm. Roses selected from regional growers are more likely to endure local climates, however roses are a hardy group of plants and usually offer many years of fragrant bloom for relatively low cost. 

Roses are not difficult

Roses are not difficult to root from stem cuttings. I prune back the largely overgrown roses late each fall. Pots of pencil thick stems pruned from roses were buried into the cold frame soil, mulch mounded around them and largely forgotten. Now, they are covered in green leaves ready for transplant. The Pilgrims brought roses across the Atlantic in much the same manner and likewise roses migrated across North America in covered wagons, for many, the last remnant of home. Rambling or climbing roses may be “layered” under soil and readily root. Rose hips gathered just before Hurricane Sandy scoured beaches and tore away naturalized beach roses germinated two years afterwards, a glacial pace for the gardener but at last success roses from seed. For millennia, roses have been propagated via cuttings or layering. Seeds offer the widest genetic diversity although most people steep rose hips in hot water for soothing herbal teas enriched with high doses of vitamin C. Greek friends flavor pastries and confections with rosewater, a distinctly different palette for most Americans but common in the Levant and Near East.  

Many roses are grafted onto plain but healthy varieties of rose. Grafted roses are usually described as grafted when obtained. However, unless of course, propagation is an aspect of horticulture that interests and interesting it is, roses inspire to complicate a simple notion: a rose is a rose is a rose. Their truth endures by any other name. Grafted roses nearly always confuse after time, is the rootstock in bloom or the inbred trophy? 

Welcome June

Welcome June with a rose bush. Hurry up, we have only a couple weeks to rescue those sad plants now languishing in a nursery, orphaned and alone in the world. Surely there is room for a rose in your life. 

Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.

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