Everything's Coming Up Roses – 4


My field trial roses include Weeks' original Home Run™ and this year, Pink Home Run™, both bred from the KnockOut™ strain. Dan raves about the original's dark red color, which seemed to me a little off. Just goes to show you that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I quickly discovered, however, that it's unaffected by dogs, handymen, clay soil, drought, and disease (it doesn’t seem to get any). You just have to keep the Japanese Beetles picked off.

 
I'm crazy about the pink version, which I received this spring, so it's still
a smallish plant. All of them are the offspring of a single mutated branch on a Red KnockOut™, which sported pink blossoms. It fills the hole created when we lost the Rainbow KnockOut™ to snow and ice.

My three favorite roses for fragrance are the grandiflora Melody Parfumée™ (Jackson & Perkins) Oklahoma™ (Weeks), a hybrid tea, and Moondance™ (Jackson & Perkins), a floribunda.



Melody is a purply lavender that lightens with a kind of silver tint as the blooms age. It has a light, but still quite strong, old-rose scent. I bought this plant as a huge potted specimen that continued to perform magnificently until two years ago. The first year, it was mercilessly attacked by Japanese Beetles before I realized what was happening and last year, in its already weakened condition, nearly succumbed to our unusual summer rains and chilly weather. It's a tribute to Melody's vigor that, while a shadow of its former self, it's recovering nicely. 


Oklahoma™, the official flower of that state, has huge deep black-red flowers with a very strong old-rose scent that will make any rose-lover swoon. Good-humored jostling for the first-to-sniff position has become an annual ritual in our garden. In our microclimate of Zone 5B, we lost three of these before I learned to heavily mulch to help them through the winter. It was worth it.



 
Moondance™ is a 2007 AARS winner with creamy white blooms and dark green glossy leaves. Its fragrance is described both as raspberry-like and spicy -- mild but intoxicating. Moondance™ blooms later than Oklahoma and we watch the buds forming with great anticipation, ready to get in a few whiffs of heaven before the blooms are gone.

More next time….. 

Search Amazon.com for roses 

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading