Why Grow Roses
Rose lovers defend their favorite flower. They are easy to grow, they say, and not much trouble at all. My response to this is, compared to what? I have been sitting here wondering what flower is more trouble than a rose to grow in your garden. A Venus flytrap is all I can think of. The reality is, you must spray roses and feed them and prune them. Every one of those tasks must be done at least twice a year, really more if you want your roses to look good. And if you have very many roses, each of those tasks is a day's work. If you have many roses and you keep them in top form, you could probably spend half of every other Saturday working on your roses.
We don't. I probably spend four Saturdays a year pruning. I love the job, but I always get ripped to shreds. Craig feeds two to three times a year, and it takes him most of a Saturday each time. We spray when we really need to, if we get around to it. Claims are made on behalf of many roses that they are disease resistant. This means, disease resistant compared to some other roses, which may be severely disease-prone. But if you never spray your roses, they will develop black spot and powdery mildew. Actually, I never had powdery mildew until I brought home some new roses from one of those prissy nurseries that claims not to use nasty chemicals.
It's the same with new roses about which it is claimed that they are not bothered by insects. I don't know what they are talking about. Insects don't generally kill roses. They just make them hideous and ruin all the blooms -- unless you spray them. So we spray.
For a long time, decades in fact, all anybody ever seemed to grow were hybrid tea roses. Named and patented, exhibited in shows, these flowers are the very image of a rose: long, straight stems, perfectly formed, brilliantly colored. They are homely in the landscape, though. They live to be shown off in a vase. I used to have quite a few.
Then one day at Howard's Nursery in about 1985 I saw three little rose bushes sitting off to the side. You know how the tea roses look in a nursery in the spring. They have long, straight, fat green canes and monsterous thorns and blooms. These little bushes were puny by comparison. "Duchesse de Brabant," I read on the tag, and "Souvenir de Malmaison." Heirloom roses. I snapped them up.
The Duchesse is the sprawling pink rose vaulting to eight feet in the picture above. The ivory climber closer to the house is Alister Stella Grey. These fine old bushes are a riddle to prune, and yes, they do want to be fed and sprayed, but look how beautiful they are in the landscape. So many flowers, too. Oh yes, the flowers. Why grow roses:
