Kukielski - Roses without chemicals : 150 disease-free varieties that will change the way you grow roses

diseas e-free varieties that will change the way you grow roses

Roses

without chemicals

Peter E. Kukielski

Timber Press

PortlandLondon

Frontispiece: Alexandra Princesse de Luxembourg

Copyright 2015 by Peter E. Kukielski. All rights reserved.

Published in 2015 by Timber Press, Inc.

Illustrations on by Peter Kukielski, produced by David Jacobson.

Photo credits appear on .

Text and cover design by David Jacobson, ORT

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kukielski, Peter.

Roses without chemicals: 150 disease-free varieties that will change the way you grow roses/Peter E. Kukielski.1st edition.

pages cm

Other title: One hundred fifty disease free varieties that will change the way you grow roses

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-60469-683-7

1. RosesVarietiesNorth America. 2. RosesDisease and pest resistanceNorth America. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred fifty disease free varieties that will change the way you grow roses.

SB411.6.K85 2015

635.933734dc23 2014020741

A catalog record for this book is also available from the British Library.

For Drew

Contents

Preface

(Its not your fault)

Beautiful, healthy roses like PlumPerfect are part of a new trend toward sustainable rose gardening.

Whether you are a home gardener or the steward of a public rose garden anywhere in the world, I want you to have the confidence to grow roses, or to grow roses again, without chemicals. Thats my dream and thats why I wrote this book. By the time you have finished reading, I hope you will feel free to grow a huge variety of these spectacular plants.

Because nearly everyone has heard the phrase Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose I often quote it when talking with people in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, where I was the curator for eight growing seasons. These words come from the 1913 Gertrude Stein poem Sacred Emily, and people have taken the line to mean something like Things are what they are. Ironically, the rose was a very bad example for Stein to use for her metaphor. Taken as commonly understood, the sentence would mean that all roses are basically the same, and no matter which pretty picture you see in a rose catalog, the plants are all going to grow the same, smell the same, and perform the same. Stein would have been more on target if she had written, Rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose. Thats because all roses are not created equal. Or, more importantly, all roses are not created for the same purpose.

The process of creating new rose varieties is called hybridization. Breeders cross one rose with another rose to create a new variety that has a different combination of genes than either of its parent plants. Almost all roses that you can buy today have been hybridized for one purpose or another. Sometimes that purpose is to emphasize a gorgeous color that catches your eye. Maybe the hybridizer likes a certain cupped flower. Sometimes it is for a particular fragrance or growth habit. Some roses are created with hardiness in mind, because the hybridizer wants or needs the roses to survive harsh winters.

With thousands of roses now available on the market, the choice to the home gardener can be daunting and confusing. In my quarter-century of purchasing and growing roses, I have always desired to find a rose that is better than the one I am growing at the moment. Im always on the lookout for the next best thing, the next best rose. Does this sound familiar? Some of my friends have a similar desire with fashionalways wanting the next great trend or popular item. I used to think that roses are similarly fashionable and that the rose industry mirrored the fashion industry. In both these worlds, a color or style can be hot one year and out the next.

Yet too often, when I found a stunning image of a rose in a magazine and determined that I must have that treasure, ordered it, put it in the ground, cultivated it, and loved itit rewarded me with disappointment. The leaves became diseased, its color or fragrance was lackluster, or even worse, the entire rose bush died. Many despondent and frustrated rose lovers have shared similar stories with me.

Perhaps this has also happened to you and if so here is the central point I want to make in this book: it is not your fault. In the pages that follow I am going to explain to you why some roses fail to thrive, and how to choose and grow roses in an environmentally sensitive way for your garden, in your part of the country. In the directory youll find 150 of the best-performing and most disease-resistant roses available on the market today. I have grown every one of these roses myself and have chosen them out of the many thousands of other roses that I have grown and trialed over the years. I have included a rating for each rose based on the qualities that matter most to gardeners: disease-resistance, bloom, and fragrance. You can rest assured that they are the very best choices for a sustainable, chemical-free rose garden.

Autumn Damask

The New Millennial Rose Garden

The new millennial rose garden is full of disease-free, long-blooming plants.

A rose is hybridized for whatever purpose or purposes its creator is seeking, those qualities the hybridizer wants to maximize. But when a rose is hybridized to maximize any one quality, there is the possibility that some other facet will be compromised or sacrificed. Too often in todays marketplace, roses are hybridized for a narrow, superficial beauty that will attract the consumer in a catalog, garden center, or florist shop. But just like the fruit and vegetables that are bred to look perfect on supermarket shelves, these hybridized plants can go bad very quickly. Selecting roses because they have good looks may actually be counter-productive. That lovely rose may soon be riddled with leaf spot because the ability to resist disease has been bred out of it.

This book will help you learn about the specific hybridization efforts toward disease resistance and sustainability in roses. Of the thousands of roses available on the market, I want you to know about roses that are right for you and that you will be able to grow successfully, disease-free and chemical-free. I also want you to know about the best way to plant and care for these roses.

Right for you also means right for the area where you garden. Understanding the effect of your local climate on roses determines how successful you will be in growing them. Its unreasonable to assume that roses that might be successful in Miami or England would also be successful in Maine or Norway. If together we can identify roses that are good performers for your region and climate, then I know you will have better, healthier roses based on that factor alone.