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| 'Jens Munk', 8/19/11 |
The game is afoot Watson, for a great mystery has arisen on the prairie. On Monday, I returned from a 4 day trip, little knowing that gloom and despair had visited my garden in my absence. From as far away as the windows of the house, though, I could easily see that a monk had died in my garden. A 'Jens Munk' Canadian Rose, that is. I took a picture of it this morning so you could view the dearly departed with me. Completely sad, isn't it? Click on the picture if you absolutely must see it in vivid detail.
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| 'Jens Munk', 4/24/11 |
I'd been watching and nursing this beautiful shrub rose along for over a year, pampering it with judicious compost and water, but now that it has given up the struggle, I'm determined to investigate the death until the culprit is identified and blame is assigned. As regular readers of my blog know, I first noticed the rose had a problem last fall when approximately half of the bush suddenly died and I talked about it then in
this blog post. At the time, I was blaming the late summer drought we had last year and you can bet that I lavished some extra care and water on it this year, especially in the long stretch of 100+F temps we had in July. It started out the year pretty decently, with the remaining bush leafing out well and looking healthy as you can see at the left. A couple of new canes had sprouted in the vicinity of the dead ones I had pruned, and I had hopes that the bush was going to recover. Alas, in the span of a few short days the rest of the bush went from green, to brown and shriveled, and it did it in the period after we had finally had some cool relief from the drought and summer heat stress.
I'm slightly torn between digging it up to get "at the root of the problem" or leaving the roots alone in case some surviving tender rootlet wants to regrow. This rose has never suckered as most Rugosa hybrids do, so I don't have the benefit of being able to get an easy start of it. I've decided to uproot it to inspect the roots anyway. I can't imagine what the issue was; no visible disease, no rot in the canes I cut off last year, no rodent activity in the area, no sign of iron chlorosis. I've never seen crown or rose gall here on my roses and there is no evidence of it on the surface of this own-root plant. The other roses closest to it, including 'Robusta', 'Blanc Double de Coubert', 'Alchymist', and 'Louise Odier' , are all doing well and look healthy. At least two of those are also Rugosa hybrids, so I can't blame the bloodlines. I'll examine the root system, the canes, and also test a soil sample for pH. One thing I'm sure of is that the rose didn't get too dry this year.
In memory of this cold-hardy beauty of a rose, taken from me in the prime of her life, despite her excellent overall form, healthy foliage, nice pink blush, and the few plump hips that I always admired winter, I give you 'Jens Munk', glorious in May of 2009, before the decline started:
I have to be truthful here and admit that I did not carefully follow and dig around each separate root to definitively examine the entire root ball. In engineering terms, what I did would be described as considering all available environmental factors and determining that the best way to facilitate a solution to the issue was to apply increasing lateral mechanical force to an anchored beam, resulting in a separation of the fauna/soil interface. To the rest of us, it means that on a hot (97F) day, with the Kansas sun bearing down on me, the best I could manage before my body turned to dust was to dig out the soil around the crown of the plant to a depth of 3 inches and encircle it with a really thick rope. I then tied said rope to the trailer hitch ball on my Jeep, jumped into the air-conditioned Jeep, put it in first gear, and jammed the accelerator down until I ripped the plant out of the ground. That is why the remaining roots look so short in the picture to the right.
I learned nothing, essentially. I could not determine any earthly reason why Jens Munk died. When you look closely at the picture above, you can see that what I really had here was two plants, the plant at the left of the above picture that died first, and the plant to the right of the picture that recently died. I cleaved them apart with an axe, as you can see at the left, and examined the cut surface, as you can see below. Yes, there was a little dirt in the center, but the wood and roots all around that area were firm and showed no evidence of rot. Cutting into the crown above this with a saw demonstrated no hollow areas of rot or borer damage. There were no cankers or below-ground mushrooms growing here. No chewed away roots or tunnels running into the prairie soil. The soil around these roots was moist (but not too moist) and had a pH of 6.4, well below the prairie soil that exists outside my mulched beds, which normally runs in the pH 7.2 range.
So, I can't tell you that I learned anything to shed light on the apparent suicide of Jens Munk. I have a small, actually a miniscule hope that one of the pieces of roots, now deprived of its above ground Master, will be healthy enough and have enough stored energy to put out a new stem of its own. Hope, but little faith. But I'm willing to give it some time, until next Spring perhaps, to see if a miracle will occur. Then, I'll follow my usual pattern and plant something else in this spot, and shortly thereafter I'm sure that I'll find that Jens Munk is growing again, about one foot to the side of where I just placed the new rose. It has happened to me that way time and again, but I'm quite willing to accept tempting the Fates, if that is the price of adding Jens Munk to my garden again.
