Purple Pavement

If there are dependable roses for a prairie garden; hardy, disease-free, tough pioneer roses, then surely the Rugosa's should be numbered  among them.  One must, however, learn to take the bad with the good of Rugosa's.   Many are fragrant and their leathery leaves resist blackspot and insects better than most modern roses.  On the downside, they often grow to be enormous bushes with a wicked set of thorns and they can sucker like crazy.  A few Rugosa hybrids, however, are the exception to the rule, and in my garden I would put the relatively recent hybrid 'Purple Pavement' in that latter category.

'Purple Pavement' was bred by Karl Baum in 1983 and sports a semi-double bloom with a good strong sweet fragrance and occasional repeat.  This is a truly "round" bush rose suitable for use as a low hedge. I haven't pruned the pictured bush at all.  Described as growing by helpmefind.com to 5 foot tall, it has reached only 3 feet in height and width in my garden in its 4th year and it has yet to sucker.   It is rated hardy to Zone 3b and withstood last summer's heat and drought very well in my garden.  I  also noted in a previous post that Purple Pavement can contribute a little fall color to the garden, the leaves turning yellow before finally dropping down and at least a few fat orange hips left behind.  It is not a well-publicized rose so don't feel bad if you haven't seen one. Suzy Verrier lists it, in her encyclopedic Rosa Rugosa, but only in a single line. It is not mentioned in Osborne and Powning's Hardy Roses, nor in the classic rose compendiums by Peter Beales.   There is a German synonym for 'Purple Pavement' is also known as 'Rotesmeer', if you're having trouble finding it.

The only drawback that I would list for 'Purple Pavement' as a garden rose is the appealing (to me) bloom color.  I am not personallly fond of the magenta-purple-pink common to many of the Rugosa hybrids such as 'Hansa' and 'Rugosa Magnifica'.   'Purple Pavement' may be described as "red" in many sources, but it is definitely "rugosa purple-pink".  If you like that hue, however, you might want to grow more of them than the single specimen that I allow to exist.  At least it minds its manners in the garden and doesn't provide you with wide-spread offspring to muddy up your color scheme.

bRRRR...

I realize this post will carry little weight with those New Englanders who get the predicted 8-16 inches of snow today (Buffalo'ers, you know who you are!), but this iPhone screenshot, taken at 6:00 a.m., will suffice to tell you how the weather fairs in Kansas today.  Luckily, no frost in my high nest above Manhattan, but there's a light frost down here in the bottoms, sufficient to stunt any tomatoes out there at this early date. 

For your daily dose of absurdity, notice the notation for the high on Wednesday; 91F....a swing of 59 degrees in two days.

They All Grow Up

Many years ago, when my daughter was perhaps six or so years of age, she returned from a late spring Manhattan Zoo outing and presented me, her hazel eyes sparkling with excitement, with a few maple seeds that she and her friend had collected from the sidewalk at the zoo.  Assuring me that these were special seeds from a marvelous and special tree, she demanded that I plant them immediately.  And I, acknowledging that they were magic seeds (made so merely by her efforts to please a gardening father), did indeed plant them with her help and direction, all the while thinking it unlikely that they would ever germinate and grow from the immature little samara that they were.

One blasted little seed did grow however, to my daughter's delight, and after finding a one-foot tall Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) seedling in a very poor place to allow further growth of a tree, I subsequently transplanted the sapling not once, but twice, all the while secretly hoping that the tree wouldn't survive the move(s).  It sounds terrible now, but this very common North American species with brittle wood and shallow roots was not high on the list of trees I wished to add to my landscape.

Evidently, however, God ignores pretentious gardening fathers and protects the dreams of stringy-blond-haired little girls because that maple has grown and thrived to become the largest tree of my yard, surpassing even the volunteer Cottonwoods that I have also allowed to mature.  At around 12 years of age, it is perhaps twenty feet tall with a trunk 6 or so inches in diameter, otherwise unremarkable except for its health and the mass of light yellow leaves that it drops for my lawnmower to pick up each Fall.

My daughter's maple surprised me this spring by setting seed for the first time, just as my little girl prepares to graduate High School, leave our nest and go off to college this summer.  ProfessorRoush, for all his deficiencies, is not so spiritually obtuse that he has missed this not-so-subtle cosmic hint about the nature of time.  Little gangly girls do grow up, despite the desires of their fathers, to become beautiful independent women, just as the tallest maple can grow from the smallest seed.  I get it, okay?




This tree will always be a part of my garden, serving forever to remind me of my young daughter and the seeds we planted, growing steadfastly and strong despite all the obstacles faced.  It has been with us through the Spring of young family life, the storms of adolescence, and it will soon serve to provide shelter and relief from the hot Kansas sun for an aging and reminiscing gardener.  Someday I hope that, long beyond my time, when this tree's time on Earth is over and being gauged in the number of growth rings, someone remembers to count the first dozen rings as I would, in the terms of memory.  This was the year she lost and regained her front teeth, this ring for the year the braces were removed, this one the first time she drove a car, this the year of her first teen love, this the year of her graduation....

It Galls Me

Something always spoils the applesauce, doesn't it?  You're anticipating a good rose year, checking the roses daily and closely to catch a glimpse of that first bud on a new cultivar in your garden.  And then you see that first leaf affected with blackspot.  Or the fine new rose cane broken off at the base by recent winds.  Or the cute little spiky balls hanging on one of your roses.

Cute little spiky balls?  Wait a minute, I think those are rose galls!

I've seen similar structures on oak trees, but never on my roses.  A quick bit of Internet research tells me that my assumption is probably correct.  These galls are likely formed by a gall wasp, perhaps a Diplolepis sp. wasp, who lay eggs on the roses in spring and whose larvae then become encapsulated within a chemically-induced distortion of the plant material.  Cut a gall ball open, as I did, and you are met with a moist cavity containing a very squirmy, disgusting, tiny white larva who is quite perturbed at the disturbance. After a more careful search, I did find some smooth balls on another rose ('Banshee') which contain similar larvae, but that seems to be the extent of my infestation.   As I am not an entomologist, I'm at a loss to determine exactly which species has chosen my rose (in this case 'Marianne') to invade, but it is probably not the Rose bedeguar gall, Diplolepis rosae, as it isn't "mossy" enough in appearance. One source, a University of California Extension publication by ML Flint and JF Karlik, suggests that there are perhaps 40 different types of rose gall.  Even worse, according to Wikipedia, there are some 800 species of gall wasps in North America. 

For the life of me, I can't find a decent "reason" for the existence of gall wasps.  Okay, they form galls, but what else do they do?  Don't laugh, it's an important question.  I need to know if I should crush these galls under my heel or let them mature on the contingency that gall wasps are a beneficial predator of a far worse disease agent.  A rose blooms to please the rosarian and its pollinator and make new little rose seeds.  An oak tree forms acorns to make little oak trees and provide squirrels an incentive to plant the acorns.  Is being a plant parasite the sole purpose of a gall wasp?  To make more galls and thus more little gall wasps?

I may be waxing a little too metaphysical today.  If I carry my thought a little further, I must also acknowledge that the gall wasp may be by turn wondering what my existence means.  Does the large bipedal mammal exist solely to protect his roses and make more little bipedal mammals?  Or merely to write about his fleeting thoughts and send them out into the ether?  Exactly how many angels can dance on a rose bud?