sesoR deredruM

In homage to my daughter's love of The Shining, and for Danny Lloyd's great child acting in the movie of the same name, you should read the title of this entry backwards to find the true meaning....

I had a sad start to this gardening year as I assessed the damages done by our recent cold dry Winter and still dry Spring, but I still had to face the worst moments of the season last week during my garden spring cleanup.  This Spring will hereafter live in my memory as "The Year of the Springtime Rose Massacre."  I set forth a couple of weeks ago with sharpened secateurs, honed trimmers and spade, intent on ridding my garden of any visible signs of Rose Rosette disease.  'Amiga Mia', 'Aunt Honey', 'Frau Karl Druschki', and 'Benjamin Britten' were ruthlessly ripped at young ages from my Kansas soil.  Shovel-pruned alongside them were 'Altissimo', 'Gene Boerner', 'Grootendorst Supreme', 'Calico Gal', 'Golden Princess', and 'Butterfly Magic'.  I was particularly sorry to sacrifice my favorite siblings 'Mme Isaac Pereire' and 'Mme Ernest Calvat', and I will miss their intense perfumes and come-hither blossoms this summer.  A once-blooming climber from a previous rose rustling episode was yet another casualty, forever destined to be an unnamed memory.  With malice in mind, I also took advantage of the wholesale slaughter to rub out 'Sally Holmes'.  "Sally Homely", as I refer to her, was only showing questionable signs of Rosette disease, but I pruned her on principle, a token offering to the God of Healthy Roses.

Only 'Folksinger' remains as a possible Rosette Typhoid Mary in my garden, on life support since I know she was previously infected, but in her defense she has shown no further signs since a low cane-pruning early last year, and her new growth all looks healthy at this time.  Of note, 'Golden Princess' was the second I have lost to unmistakable signs of Rose Rosette.  Out of 200+ individual roses, is that a coincidence, or is this cultivar unusually susceptible to Rose Rosette?  And stalwart survivors 'Purple Pavement' and 'Blanc Double de Coubert' died back to their roots this year.  Did these tough old Rugosas succumb only to the cold and drought of winter, or are they also silent casualties of Rosette infection?  Both appear right now to be growing back from their roots, but I've never seen the slightest winter kill before on either rose here in Kansas.

Today, I aim to continue the rose carnage, but this time I'm facing a different foe.  My beloved 'Red Cascade' was a victim of a pack rat blitzkreig this winter and I'm going to destroy their nest and free him from bondage,  You can see the mulch-formed mass of the nest in the center of the picture at the left, surrounded by all the dead and sick 'Red Cascade' canes.  I'm sure my counterattack will involve a great loss of innocent young rose canes, but I will not rest until the fascist pack rats have been pushed back to their prairie homeland.

Buck's Golden Princess



Rosa 'Golden Princess'

Now that we've had a day of sunshine, I can't wait any longer to show you my two-year-old toddling princess from the breeding program of the late Professor Griffith Buck.  So, without further ado; live from the Flint Hills of Kansas and having barely escaped drowning and freezing to death; the slightly rain-damaged blossoms of 'Golden Princess':

'Golden Princess' seems to be a little-known output from Dr. Buck, but I believe she deserves better recognition.  The earliest official description I have from an often copied, old type-written font sheet, is that she is a yellow-blend shrub rose of 1984 vintage.  The current Iowa State extension website describes the rose and its coloring in dry terms as "The large, ovoid-pointed buds of pale aureolin yellow (RHSCC 12D) open to double (30-35 petals), cupped, open. 4-4.5 inch blooms of deeper aureolin yellow (RHSCC 12A) tinted spinel red (RHSCC 54A) on petal edges, and finishing pale spinel red (RHSCC 54C)."  I suppose that if you have a Royal Horticultural Society Colour Chart, you could make probably some sense of that cold scientific description, but suffice it to say that the picture at upper right is accurately hued, and the rose is essentially a yellow-cream-golden blend fading to pink and almost red at the edges.  For those who like golden-yellow-peachish-orange blooms such as Peace and Alchymist, this rose is a "must grow." 

'Golden Princess' blooms all summer in clusters of 1-5 and the blooms have a moderate degree of fragrance.  The rose survives here in Zone 5B Kansas with some tip die-back noted both years that I have grown it, but the semi-glossy, dark green foliage is iron clad during the growing season and requires no spray for disease.  Parentage was a little hard to come by, but is listed on the Elko County, Nevada, Rose website and on helpmefind as "Hawkeye Belle (seed) X (Roundelay X Country Music) (pollen).  I don't know how those writers know that, so take that information with a grain of salt.  Regardless, as a shrub, 'Golden Princess' is small, only about 2 feet tall and 1.5 feet wide beginning its third summer for me, so it is perfectly suited for a small garden.  As the only drawback that I can see, it has large tan thorns that are a bit on the wicked side when it comes time for Spring pruning.

Give her a try for a manageable shrub rose of startling beauty.  Did I mention that the best part of this rose may be the just-opening buds?