Traditionally, old garden varieties and Hybrid Teas dominated the rose market. These varieties were delicate and bred specifically for their beauty. Their diseases, pests, and climate limitations were the burden of the individual gardener—a burden born with great pride, because very few people were willing to make the sacrifice. To have a yard full of roses spoke loudly, touting the reputation of the rosarian. Many people who grew roses grew little else. That is starting to change.
New, low-maintenance rose varieties are introducing rose gardening to new demographic groups, and redefining the rosarian. After the Rose Knock Out was chosen as an All- America Rose Selection (AARS) in 2000, it sold better in the following years than any rose ever before. The disease resistance and hardiness of this plant made it accessible to even the most novice gardeners. Commercial landscapers who normally avoided roses because of the hassle began using them everywhere. This was the start of a different way of thinking about roses. Breeders have seen how much people love easy roses, and I think roses will continue to get stronger.
Finally,
roses for everyone to enjoy. Some people believe that one can only hold the coveted titles of Rosarian through suffering and endless fussing with the flowers. That is not the case any longer and its a beautiful new day for us all.
Wayside Gardens was mentioned in the New York Times because we are one of the few US carriers of the super hardy Kordes roses. The roses from German breeder, Kordes, have been selectively bred since the early nineties to be resistant to everything that rosarians hate about growing roses.
No harmful chemicals are necessary to prevent black-spot– these rose are inately durable and are expected to perform even better in the climate of the United States. In Germany, the climate is cooler than most of the United States. The Kordes roses do well in germany, but these hardy lovelies are expected to take off in the places in the US that have longer growing seasons.
Check out the article here: Kordes Roses, in the New York times Home and Garden section.
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Wayside Gardens horts say February is the month for pruning your roses. Some hybrid Teas need drastic pruning every year, the severity of which depends on what your intentions are for your roses. If you are pruning for professional exhibition and are looking to get nice big blooms, but maybe only a few, then you would need to prune within 3 to 4 inches of the ground. For normal garden display, 8 to10 inches will give the best results.
When pruning your roses, start by removing diseased or weak canes, cutting back to healthy wood. Next, if you have any canes that cross too closely, cut one of them back. Finally, cut back the rest of the canes to about 8 to 10 inches above the ground, pruning stronger canes less and weaker canes a little more. Of course, before you start any of this, please research your particular Tea variety, and be sure that there is no special treatment required. Some varieties do not respond well to strong pruning.
For more information you could check out this article on pruning roses from GardenerHelp.org.
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Many of the roses and fruit trees sold from Wayside Gardens are grafted plants. Grafted plants are simply your desired plants grown on top of a hardy rootstock. The top part of the plant, the part that matters, is called the scion. The scion bears all of the fruit, flowers, or foliage that we want.
Grafted plants are beneficial because they serve to increase variety, improve quality, and reduce prices. The extra hardy rootstock ensures survival for plants in zones that would normally be way too cold, allowing you to grow plants which would otherwise be off-limits. When a fruit tree is grafted to a mature rootstock allows fruit production much sooner than if you had to wait for the original roots to mature. You also know exactly what you are getting. Your plant has been cloned and will be exactly what you wanted. Clonal reproduction is also much quicker than growing from seed, making it more cost-effective.
Plants are grafted onto very similar plants, usually the of same genus. Most of Wayside Gardens’ grafted roses are grafted onto ‘Dr. Huey’, a hardy old rose with flat blooms that are deep crimson with a golden center. You will see them often at old home sites where the scions have long died off, and the Dr. Huey rootstock has flourished. The Wayside Gardens fruit trees are often grafted onto strong, wild versions of themselves. For example, there is pear rootstock, which, left to it’s own devices, would grow tangled branches with nasty thorns. Make sure you trim back the growth from your rootstock if you don’t want it to take over. Sometimes, in a case where the delicate scion cannot take the extremes and dies back, the rootstock may take over completely. Make sure you pamper your young grafted plant until it gets established.
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The new Shrub Hybrids such as Knock Out are brilliant, of course, but for those gardeners who like their Roses with a bit of history, many of the Old Garden varieties cope better with black spot than most modern hybrids. (They didn’t last for hundreds of years by taking ill at the first prolonged rain every summer, after all!)
The lovely old Bourbon climber Zephirine Drouhin has grown on the north side of my parents’ house for donkey’s years. The epitome of “low maintenance” (purely a euphemism in our gardener’s mind for doing absolutely nothing, ever), old Z.D. gets about half a day of sun, when she’s lucky, and a barrow full of manure in good years. In a fit of ambition back in the 1930s or so, some long-departed gardener created a frame for her around two of the back bedroom windows, and at some point Z.D. was trained up and into this frame, then left to fend for herself. By the time my brother and I came along and took possession of the two bedrooms, Z.D.’s chief purpose in life was providing footholds for our trainers as we scrambled from the garden into our rooms (and later, as teens, out of our bedrooms and through the night garden to freedom!). I can verify that this Rose is “nearly” thornless, as we always say. More to the point, it really does put up with an amazing amount of abuse, and not only stays free of black spot but seems impervious to mildew as well.
New Dawn is another old Rose, though not reaching back to Victorian times or boasting French origins like Zephirine Drouhin. It debuted in the U.S. in 1930, a perpetual-flowering sport of the renowned ‘Dr. W. Van Fleet,’ and it received the very first patent ever issued to a Rose. Its glossy foliage is legendary, and I maintain that it is still the climber with which to decorate an arbor or pergola, for it’s simply so reliable you never worry about it. Use it as background, if you must, with newer, flashier climbers twined in, but don’t be surprised when they’ve done their bit by July 1 and New Dawn is still pushing out sweetly scented pink blossoms as August turns to September! I like to imagine the Rose lovers of 1930, a bit flummoxed by the stock market crash and the talk of a national Depression, somewhat guiltily splashing out on New Dawn, never dreaming they had just invested in one of the most dependable, beautiful, and flower-filled cultivars ever grown.
Iceberg is another older favorite for black spot resistance. Actually Kordes didn’t introduce it until 1958, but the instant it arrived, it seemed it had always been with us! The original Iceberg was a Floribunda, but ten years later a climbing sport was found in England, and it is this climbing version that I believe really outdoes itself in disease resistance. Its masses of white blooms are far more fragrant than their Floribunda parent’s as well, and borne over a seemingly endless summer season. There are few things in a garden more useful than a fragrant white Rose, and Iceberg needs no fussing over.
Finally, no Rose lover’s garden is complete without Rosa chinensis Mutabilis, the fine old single-flowered China Rose said by some to have turned up in Italy in the 19th century, and certainly given in 1894 to the Swiss gardener Henri Correvon by Prince Gilberto Borremeo. Graham Stuart Thomas, that consummate lover of old Roses, offers a description of many early “sightings” of this Rose in his stupendous The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book; from all these we can deduce that this was an extraordinary Rose, marked by everyone who grew or even saw it, and destined to survive into modern times by its easygoing adaptability and robust vigor. I confess that it is among my very favorite Roses, not least because it does not act like a Rose in the garden, and I scarcely think of it as such. Set in the sunny perennial garden, it flowers continuously all summer, its deep orange-red buds opening to blooms that change from butter yellow to rich pink to bold crimson during their short display. There is no time to mourn their passing; they are replaced by newcomers too abundant to snub! In my garden this shrub grows 6 feet high, but I confess to considerable pampering (and that hot southern U.S. climate); whether it reaches 3 feet or 9, it is exactly the right size, and will be adored.
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Black spot gets a foothold in the garden when leaves stay wet too long, or when a black spot-infected shrub comes into contact with another through crowding in the garden, infected leaves or canes lying in the planting bed, etc. It’s a problem in any climate, and is especially challenging for gardeners in areas with lots of rain or high humidity — the South, Midwest, etc.
Here are some things gardeners can do to keep this troublemaker away:
- use drip irrigation (a soaker hose) or a hand-held hose so that only the base of the Rose gets wet when you water, not the leaves.
- if that’s not an option, water early in the morning to give the moisture a chance to evaporate as the day warms up.
- don’t crowd Roses in the garden. I like the wild natural look myself, but Roses do best when their leaves don’t overlap with other plants a lot. And if black spot does develop, overlapping foliage will spread it like wildfire.
- by the same token, plant Roses in an open setting, rather than a close, confined area like a walled patio. Good air circulation goes a long way in preventing black spot.
- keep the area around Roses very clean and free of fallen leaves.
- Of course, a certain way to prevent black spot is to spray your Roses. There are many excellent black spot sprays that work not only before the fungus appears, but even after you have spotted a yellow leaf or two.
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