Healthy Butterfly Magic

S'il vous plaît permettez-moi de vous présenter 'Butterfly Magic'....er....excuse me.....Please allow me to introduce you to 'Butterfly Magic', a Griffith Buck rose introduced by Chamblee's Rose Nursery in 2010.  As many are aware, there are 10 "posthumous" Griffith Buck roses which were originally given to friends and later introduced after Dr. Buck's death in 1991.  Their parentage is often unknown, but if they survived in the gardens of friends, as some of them did for years before commercial introduction, we can probably assume that they're pretty disease resistant.

And 'Butterfly Magic' is certainly disease resistant.  Look at that beautiful glossy foliage, here, in August, with no spray whatsoever in a wetter-than-average Kansas summer.  There isn't a spot of blackspot or an insect-damaged leaf on the bush that I can see.  This is the second year for 'Butterfly Magic' in my garden and she hasn't reached her full growth yet, but she was cane hardy here last winter as a tiny rose-tot, and she has grown as much as any rose this year.  I have a 2 year old start of 'Quietness' in the bed next to her, and although I view 'Quietness' as one of Buck's healthier and more vigorous roses, my 'Butterfly Magic' has been growing just as well next to it, and is just as healthy.  It just seems to be a tough year for the roses, with the extra rain and late spring.

'Butterfly Magic' opens up with moderately large 4 inch diameter salmon pink blooms with yellow centers.  The blooms are semi-double, with 12-16 petals, open flat, and have only a very light fragrance to my nose.  They bloom in broad clusters and fade from their homogeneous salmon to a light pink or white, often mottled with spots from moisture.  The yellow stamens and pistils provide wonderful contrast in the new bloom, but fade to brown as the flowers age.  According to Heirloom Roses, the mature size will be 4' X 4', but mine, in its second full season, is only about 2' X 2'.  There is very little available on the Internet or in my rose-themed books about 'Butterfly Magic', and she is not registered or listed in Modern Roses 12, so this is the best I can give you right now.  Chamblee's doesn't list it on their website any longer and the only current source I know of is Heirloom Roses.

 And, no, I don't speak French, but Google Translate is a marvelous thing.  Given the pace of technology, I assume we're only a few years away from a Star Trek-like Universal Translator.  What a marvelous world we live in.

Quiet, Demure, and Uninspiring

'Quietness'

I've kept mum (pun intended) for quite a while about 'Quietness', one of the "post-Griffith-Buck" introduced roses that were reportedly bred by Griffith Buck, and I suppose I should finally say something about it.  It's not that I haven't noticed the rose in my garden or watched its every bloom develop and open, my silence simply stems from a lack of enthusiasm.  I just don't know yet how I feel about 'Quietness'.  I can tell you that I'm not stark raving mad, avid, or agog about it at the present time.  Perhaps all the Internet hype about this rose had me expecting more. 



'Quietness'

'Quietness' was introduced in 2003 by Roses Unlimited, and she quickly gained acclaim as a show rose and garden performer.  I have to agree that Quietness' is a good rose and that she is a good cutting rose for the house.  She is the light blush pink of a new baby's cheeks and very full of petals, a double rose of some 40+petals that is also blessed with a strong perfume.  I don't know the proper term for the petal shape, but I would call it a "bi-lobed" petal, with almost, but not quite, a fringed rim.   The blooms start out in classic Hybrid Tea form, open full, and are quite large, almost 4" inches in diameter.  Blooms are often, as pictured here, borne in clusters and may be seen in several stages on a cluster.  All these are carried on a healthy bush more Hybrid Tea-form to me than shrublike.  Leaves are moderately resistant to blackspot for me, with <25% loss this year for me (as always, without spray).  This rose grows tall, 4-5 feet, but is not terribly wide in my garden at present.  Overall, I'd say she is lighter pink, slightly smaller, and more double-flowered, but otherwise resembles 'Queen Elizabeth'.  Is that an endorsement or a slight?

Esteemed rosarian Paul Zimmerman, writing from South Carolina, raves about 'Quietness', saying she is the easiest keeper in the garden of one of his friends, and "If you are looking for a stunning, soft pink, non stop blooming, smell-o-rama experience, than Quietness is the rose for you."  In an even more impressive endorsement, Peggy Rockerfeller Rose Garden curator Peter Kukielski  and his staff at the New York Botanical Gardens rated 845 roses for 3 years for hardiness and disease resistance and the winner was 'Quietness'(!), just ahead of 'Home Run' and 27 spots ahead of 'Knock Out'!   So perhaps, my specimen just isn't quite old enough to shine yet, or perhaps 'Quietness' does better in other climates such as the Atlantic seaboard, than it does in the MidWest.  If the latter is true and she performed adequately but not spectacularly in Dr. Buck's Iowa State proving grounds, that could explain why Dr. Buck didn't release the rose during his lifetime.  Right now, based on my experience this year growing a number of young Griffith Buck roses and as I noted earlier, I'd have given the best-newcomer nod to 'Chorale', another light pink, and for me, more rapidly repeating, Buck rose.

Update 09/27/2013;  Okay, I take some of it back.  Looking at 'Quietness' again, I realize that I overestimated its blackspot and that it actually has practically none and has retained all its foliage while 'Chorale' has lost about half its foliage.  I stand by the observation that 'Chorale' repeats its bloom faster.

Chorale

In this year's young group of Griffith Buck roses, the award for the best performance by a newcomer goes to little-known 'Chorale'.  This rose has wowed me over and over with its color and its form.  In my "Central Buck" bed, it grows right next to 'Quietness', the latter a better-known and highly regarded Buck rose, yet 'Chorale' is out-performing it day after day.

'Chorale' is a light pink Shrub rose bred by Dr. Buck in 1978.  There is little information on the Internet regarding this rose beyond its parentage, listed on helpmefind.com as a tetraploid cross between a seedling of 'Ruth Hewitt' X 'Queen Elizabeth', with a seedling of 'Morning Stars' X 'Suzanne'.  'Suzanne' is a pink Spinosissima and gives 'Chorale' her presumed hardiness and perhaps the moderate thorniness, but I can see little other evidence of Spinosissima in her.  The other three ancestors are all Modern hybrids, with 'Queen Elizabeth' the only well-known rose of the group.

'Chorale' has nice, high-centered, fully double blooms of 50 petals and the color is a perfect pale pink that will blend well with almost any other rose or perennial.  The blooms are large, approximately 3 1/2 inches in diameter, and they fade to white as they age.  She has a strong apple fragrance that is particularly prominent on hot days, dark green, healthy leaves, and she blooms continually; since she was six inches high, I've never seen her without a bloom and already this summer she's on at least her 3rd flush in the photo at the left.  I can't ask for more from a baby rose. 

'Chorale' was chosen as a blackspot-susceptible control plant in one Earth-Kind study (Zlesak DC et al, HortScience 2010;45:1779-87), but the results of challenging the plant with 3 different "races" of blackspot did not show 'Chorale' as the worst of the test group.  In fact it had less blackspot than Belinda's Dream, a designated Earth-Kind rose for two of the three strains of blackspot.  Since rose cultivar resistance to blackspot is dependent on the blackspot strain or strains in a region and since resistance changes as the pathogen evolves, I can only state here that 'Chorale' is blackspot free in my garden at present (unsprayed), as you can see from the photo above.   

A "chorale" is a "hymn or psalm sung to a traditional or composed melody in church," or it refers to a "chorus or choir".  When Dr. Buck named this rose, I'm not sure if he was paying homage to the beauty of the blooms or if he was referencing the fact that this rose always seems to have a group of blooms on it, but I suppose he could be referring to both meanings of the name.  Regardless, this is a rose that I'm going to expect a lot out of in the future.