I've Stooped So Low

'Carefree Sunshine'

My ongoing battle against Rose Rosette disease, and the annual Kansas summer scorch, has led to a few casualties over the summer, with a corresponding number of empty spots in my garden.   "Beggars," as they say, "can't be choosers," and consequently when a good friend generously offered me several established 'Sunny Knockouts" that she was planning to discard, I decided to take them for filler.  

'Carefree Sunshine'

I already have a 'Carefree Sunshine', or 'RADsun', in my garden, a lone rose placed in my "peony garden" in the shade of an Oak tree.  It survives, barely, and gets absolutely no care including a lack of pruning.  'Carefree Sunshine', for those who know it, was bred by Bill Radler before 1991, and is a light yellow shrub rose with semi-double blooms that form in clusters.  In my garden, it has reached about 3 X 3 feet in size, and it remains there, shaded almost out of existence, but clinging to its square foot of soil without being a nuisance.  It seems to be reasonably resistant to blackspot and is cane hardy throughout most winters here.  I originally planted it to please SHE-WHO-PREFERS-HER-ROSES-NOT-TO-BE-PINK (Mrs. ProfessorRoush), and despite that knock (sic) against this Knock Out cousin, I would like the rose more if it had more petals and shined a little brighter.

'Carefree Sunshine'

'Sunny Knock Out', or 'RADsunny', is a different rose than RADsun, a paler yellow, and single (4-8 petals).  Also bred by Radler, it was introduced by Conard-Pyle in 2008, a yellow addition to the Knock Out rose family.   I chose three plants from my friend, which are now planted in several prominent spots in my garden, spots that I will probably regret if both the roses, and I, survive the winter to come.  Don't get me wrong, I appreciate my friend's generosity, I just don't want to admit that I've sunk to such depths of despair.  

I am consoled by the thought that these roses, like many of the Knock Out family, are probably overly susceptible to Rose Rosette and will succumb to that decrepit virus, so that someday I will be as likely to find a Dodo in my garden as a 'Sunny Knockout'.  Just yesterday, dropping my daughter at her apartment, I noticed that one of three fully grown 'Knock Out' roses outside her front steps was badly infected with Rose Rosette and likely to spread to all the others that adorn her entire apartment complex.   Given my usual fortune, my new 'Sunny Knock Out' bushes will likely survive however, and thrive to brighten Mrs. ProfessorRoush's days for years to come, while I loathe their presence every time I pass them.  Such is the plight of the desperate gardener.

Sustainable Rose

It seems to have been a long time since I blogged about a current reading, but I've been skipping among several gardening books and catching up on my fiction as well.  The summer heat is setting in and I'm beginning to do less and less in the garden during the weekend afternoons, but I do relish the chance to pick up my garden reading.  I seem to do most of my garden reading in two seasons, at the height of summer and in the dead of winter,  but I suppose that makes some logical sense. 

One recent text that I'm finishing, though, is The Sustainable Rose Garden, a 2010 Newbury Books publication edited by Pat Shanley, Peter Kukielski, and Gene Waering.  The book is a collection of essays (sometimes supplemented by a poem or short note), and it is beautifully illustrated.  All the essays are directed at some aspect of breeding or growing disease-resistant roses, or at practices in rose culture that utilize less synthetic fertilizers and artificial chemicals. 

The essays will not all be useful for all readers (chapters on Tea Roses, for instance, won't help rosarians who live in Zone 5, such as myself), but there are ideas to be gleamed from most all the writings.  The big bonuses though, are essays by well-known rosarians and rose hybridizers, such as Stephen Scanniello, Viru Viraraghavan, Jeri Jennings, and Jeff Wyckoff.  There is a whole lot of information here, including a great description of the EarthKind™ program where I learned that there is a small EarthKind trial going on right here in Kansas.

The highlight of the book for me, however, was a chapter written by William J. Radler, the Radler of 'Knock Out®' rose fame, titled Talking About My Work With Roses.  It is essentially a history of his interest in roses, his breeding program, and a listing and description of his current introductions.  It is fascinating, for instance that he does not leave the testing of blackspot resistance up to the whims of a particular summer's weather, but describes how he collects diseased leaves early in the season, drys and powderizes them, and then sprays it over the rose garden wetting down all the leaves;  in essence creating a worse-case scenario of disease to test his seedings.  I learned a number of interesting facts, including the revelation that the original 'Knock Out' took 11 years to get to market, while his shortest time of a rose to market has been 7 years.  And I learned how 'Knock Out' got its name.  The list and description of the currently-introduced Radler roses is informative, telling us which ones were sports from others or were genetically different seedlings from similar crossings.  And there are numerous tidbits and advice from Mr. Radler about dealing with horticultural mistakes, companion plantings, and tips for using roses in the design of the garden. 

It is comforting to know that William Radler, with six employees who help with the rose research and development, views his biggest challenge as "keeping ahead of the weeds."  Sound familiar?  I guess we don't need a lifetime of dedication to roses, a degree in landscape architecture, or recognition, fame and fortune to share some of the basic challenges of gardening;  we just need a kinship with the soil.      

Anti-Knockout Cultivarist

Okay, I'm just going to say it.  Somebody's got to say it first, so I will.

I absolutely hate the Knockout series of roses.

Well, okay, I don't absolutely hate them, I just regret their existence on the earth. And I don't really hate Knockout's existence, per se, I simply resent what they've done to the marketplace for roses and to local landscaping in general.  Oh fine, I do hate them. Be honest with me, won't you?  Don't we all?

Too much of a good thing is almost never a good thing.  The American electorate recognizes the fact and rarely gives either political party full control of  Executive and Legislative branches at once.  If they do, they quickly realize the error and correct it, as we saw yesterday on Election Day 2010. 

So it is with Knockout and its cousins Double Red Knockout, Pink Knockout, Double Pink Knockout, Sunny Knockout, Rainbow Knockout, Blushing Knockout and whatever other Knockout deformities there are to come. Bill Radler is a genius as a rose breeder, and he may indeed have, as one website said, "single-handedly brought rose genetics from the 20th Century into the 21st Century," but he also may be partially culpable in the recent bankruptcy of a number of large rose-breeding companies. Don't get me wrong, Knockout is a great rose. It is certainly disease-free, hardy, self-cleaning, and it blooms and blooms and blooms. It's just that in its original form,"red" Knockout is really a kind of a dark, dark pink, not anywhere near crimson red, and so I find the color clashes against my preference for bright, clear colors in my landscaping. It also has no fragrance and thus, to a real rosarian, lacks a soul. Unfortunately, Knockout is becoming so ubiquitous around town that it is about to join my common, oft-derided trio of Stella de Oro, gold-tipped junipers, and purple barberries as the fourth member of an uninspiring contemptuous landscaping quartet planted everywhere we turn our gaze. What is wrong with professional landscapers that leads them back repeatedly to those four plants?  It is so bad around here that I recently noticed that the little traffic dividers and parking lot planters in the newest commercial development were reddish-pink Knockout's as backdrops to the lower-grown dayglow-orange Stella de Oro's as far as the eye could see. Yuck. I turned my Jeep away and hightailed it to more soothing vistas.

I didn't see the tsunami coming until this year, when every local box store had nothing for sale but own-root Knockout's of various types and when the local independent nurseries were reduced to selling Knockout alongside the various normal smattering of Hybrid Teas and Grandifloras. And although all these commercial establishments were just in competition with each other to sell the most Knockout's, and although it seemed like many of them had a lot of Knockout's left over on sale at the end of the season, I've got an uneasy feeling about where the trend is leading for next year.

I'm already on the fringe of the rose gardening world with my preference for shrub and Old Garden roses, so I really detest being shoved farther towards eccentricity as rose fashions change. I can't help it: the graceful ladies that I love have better scent and form and even though they're a little more diseased and older than the newer Knockout harem, and although they don't clean up after themselves but need me to help them get rid of their spent old parts, I loved them first and always will.  Yes, I do grow a couple of the Knockouts; the bright red Double Knockout and the Double Pink Knockout, and I have another Radler rose, Carefree Sunshine that somehow, inexplicably, isn't listed as one of the Knockouts.  But all three of them are just "there" for me, nothing special, needing no care, no spraying, no pruning; just plain boring. I need the variety of bloom form, I need the heavenly scents of myrrh, musk and lemon, I miss the need for my expert care by my Old Rose gals.

In a well-discussed GardenWeb thread entitled "In Defense of Knockout," one contributor wrote "Some of you are just snobs.  Admit it."  Okay, I will.  I'll go even further. I'm declaring a class war against the new vanguard of Knockout's.  Go ahead, feel free to call me a "cultivarist," a term I just coined to describe those who are bigoted against certain bourgeois rose cultivars.  Or better yet, join me.  We can wear the label proudly as we fondle and sniff our 'Madame Hardy' blooms.