America triumphs over Knock Out!

Along with many other rose lovers, particularly along with those who like "old" roses, I occasionally go into a funk about the state of the rose industry, curse the day Bill Radler first thought about producing 'Knock Out', and mourn the loss of inventory at the local nurseries.  If you're not familiar with the issue, this link, titled "The Rise and Fall of Our National Floral Emblem", explains it pretty well.  The article was originally in the American Rose Rambler in 2010. 

The outlook has been particularly depressing this year as I wander the local stores and see only Knock Out's and shrub roses.  Two prominent local nurseries, who were faithful up until this year, stopped carrying Hybrid Teas, Floribunda's, Grandifloras, or Climbers at all.  It is as if  'Peace' and the AARS awards never existed.  Even the cheap container roses at the big box stores look more decrepit and lonelier than normal, mere memories of the roses I love.

But yesterday, on a trip to Home Depot to buy some spray paint, I found hope amidst despair.  I was wandering by the garden center roses (I still can't resist) and couldn't help but hear a woman exclaim, "Look at this 'Knock Out', Tom."  What a great color and so full of petals!"  "Oh, and it has a great smell too!"  

There, among a great sea of single-flowered  'Rainbow Knock Out's and 'Knock Out' itself, this shopper had spied a single misplaced plant of large-flowered climbing rose 'America', and recognized it for its uniqueness among the heathens.  Although I'm not a fan of 'America', Mrs. ProfessorRoush loves the rose, always has loved it, and I grow it although it struggles here in Kansas.  In fact, I've lost a couple in tough winters, but my latest has held on four years and, trimmed like a shrub, seems to be vigorously protesting my attempts to restrain it.

In a flash, I think my fellow shopper has shown me the future of roses.  It's not that the American public innately prefers the likes of  'Knock Out' and the Drift roses and other landscape roses.  It is that the rose industry made prima donnas of roses, commercialized them, branded them, weakened them, and cheapened them.  Perhaps it is a good thing that the AARS winners are being shunned.  Mostly, they sucked.  Blackspotted, cold-sensitive, thorny-caned monsters, we are not rejecting roses, we're rejecting what they have become.  We're rejecting novelty color and bling for dependability and health.   'Knock Out' is popular because anyone can grow it south of Zone 3 without care.  The fact that 'Knock Out' has no fragrance, simple blooms, and a mild color doesn't matter.  What matters is that 'Knock Out' is healthy and doesn't die.

So now, I'm thinking differently.   The breeders and nurseries have simply been taught a lesson.  Yes, there will be a period of turmoil in the rose-growing world.  In the interim, hard-liners, like myself, will turn to smaller specialty mail-order nurseries and the public will just have to put up with they're offered by Big Box.  But after that period of time, breeders will again improve the flowers and add scent back to fair rose, and increase the numbers of petals while keeping the rose bush healthy.  And we'll have new roses that we love.  Different roses, but better roses for it.  And the rose industry will rise again.  We won't forsake the rose for marigolds and snapdragons.  The world is not that crazy.

Showoffs!

'Carefree Spirit'

The last few roses to bloom for me are streaking into full display right now, so I thought I would take a few moments this morning to look through this year's pictures and identify those roses that I think really made a spectacle of themselves this year.  Not those roses that just bloomed well and often, but roses who literally bloomed so freely that you "couldn't stick a finger into them without hitting a bloom."  There were several of those, and it also struck me that most of the overachievers are also peaking right now, later blooming than most of their cousins.

'Carefree Spirit' is a relative youngster, in its 2nd full summer for me, but already it is living up to its promises. Carefree blooming and with a willing spirit, those are traits we all love in a rose.






The biggest overachiever in my garden may be my miniature climber 'Red Cascade'.  I took this picture this morning and its quality suffers as the eastern sunrise gives it an unnatural orange tint, but take a gander at a rose that is very well-named; a waterfall of bright red flowing over the limestone blocks.



'Red Cascade'

'Ballerina'

Hybrid musk 'Ballerina' is a timeless rose and provides me a more pastel-colored vision to salve the burns on my cornea, but she is still blooming like a champ right now.

'Jeanne Lavoie'

It is not so unusual for classy blooming miniature  'Jeanne Lavoie' to have a first bloom as flush as this one, but once again, she proves that she is a beautiful lass and a workhorse in the garden.  Five feet tall and growing, she should top that trellis by next year.

'American Pillar'

I always look to rambler 'American Pillar' to finish out the show for the first bloom cycle, and again this year, it isn't disappointing me.  This picture, taken this morning, reflects the fact that I didn't properly trim it and tie it up this year, but, regardless, this monster of a rose certainly has its ostentatious side.

'Hunter'

Among the more double-flowered and larger-flowered roses, I have to give special recognition here to red 'Hunter' on the right and bright pink 'Morden Centennial' below, both of which are now fading.  'Hunter' stands proudly among the young Monarda seedlings in the picture, and 'Morden Centennial' is now far past bloom, but they bloomed their heads off in their own times just to make me happy.  Both are always dependable roses for me but their early exhibition this year was more spectacular than I remember ever seeing either of them.  Thank you, girls, for adding a special splash to my rose season!  

'Morden Centennial'

As I scroll through my photos, there were many other well-blooming roses this year, the expected visual bounty from roses such as 'Champlaign' and 'Chuckles' and others, but the roses above were the cream of the crop in my rose parade.  What roses outdid their usual beauty for you this year?  What roses were your showoffs this year?

Snakes Ahoy!

One never knows, do we?  Last Friday started out as a normal day, but it certainly ended with a bang.  After my workday, Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I slipped away for a bite to eat, and then she went on home to walk our ancient Brittany Spaniel while I stopped back to check on a resident doing a surgery. 

I can testify that Mrs. ProfessorRoush was entirely normal when we parted, but twenty minutes later when I pulled into the garage, I was met at the door to my car with a disheveled, shouting caricature of my wife and a very excited Brittany.   At least I think it was my wife for she was moving so quickly her outline was blurry.  It seems that on their walk, they had encountered the first of this summer's snake denizens.  

Scotophis obsoletus, Western Rat Snake

As I listened and tried to calm Mrs. ProfessorRoush, all the while wondering if the garage and car windows were going to shatter from either decibel level or pitch, I understood clearly what detectives and FBI agents are up against when they discuss the unreliability of eyewitnesses.  If I had taken Mrs. ProfessorRoush's account as gospel, this particular snake had coiled up to a height approaching ten feet, threatened to strike at my Brittany with bared fangs, and then chased them out of the yard. 

I know that I've led many of the readers of this blog to believe that I'm also scared of snakes, but that is not entirely true.  Yes, I don't care to have them pop up at my feet or strike at my shovel from underneath a perennial I'm transplanting, but my panic episodes at such times are temporary and only rarely results these days in running clear past township or county borders.  I have been so desensitized by the number of reptiles on the Kansas Flint Hills that I certainly still jump, but then I calm down while I'm waiting for gravity to reacquaint the earth with my feet, and I rationally determine the type of snake and the relative danger to my garden visitors (pet or human).

This particular snake was (is) about a six foot long and 2 inch diameter Western Rat Snake, Scotophis obsoletus (or is it Elaphe obsoletus? Or Pantherophis obsoletus?), and it is a constrictor, not a biter.   I did not, as counseled by Mrs. ProfessorRoush, "get a shotgun and blow it to smithereens."  I have a strict species-ism hierarchy in my garden, hating rodents more than snakes, so I welcome any of the latter benign hunters.  Additionally, I have yet to see a poisonous snake in my garden and I have theorized that if a nice, big rat snake is clearing out the hunting grounds, I have less chance of hearing a rattle next to my feet as I trim the roses.  A snake this big will also occasionally catch and give a rabbit a love hug, so this guy may even help me to raise some lettuce this year.  Besides, according to my references, the Western Rat Snake has a home range of approximately 30 acres, so I'm not very likely to see him again soon.

All of the proceeding thoughts weave a nice rationalization, but it doesn't wash at all with Mrs. ProfessorRoush, who prefers all slithering insects and reptiles to be in the process of decay.  Not even the chance for fresh lettuce can dissuade her, and I now have some work to do to restore my gardening knight in shining armor image at home.  C'est la vie.   

Chuckles for Joy

'Chuckles'

I've been wrong, wrong, wrong.  Wrong about the garden worth of 'Chuckles', wrong about the breeder, and wrong about just about everything to do with this rose.  Grown on me, it has, and become one of the stars of my garden.

I believed for the longest time, right up until I began to research the rose for this blog entry, that Chuckles was a Griffith Buck-bred rose.  But it isn't a Griffith Buck rose, 'Chuckles' was, according to www.helpmefind.com, bred by Roy Shepherd in 1958.  How did I get it so wrong?  In this case, there is a perfectly simple explanation.  I swear that I'm innocent, Your Honor.  I purchased my 'Chuckles' from www.heirloomroses.com, where it is listed as a Griffith Buck rose.  It is not, however, listed as a Buck rose on Iowa State University's website or anyplace else.  Heirloom just has it wrong.  'Chuckles' was bred from a seed parent cross between 'Jean Lafitte' and 'New Dawn', and the pollen parent was 'Orange Triumph'.

She's also not a shrub rose, as I previously thought, she is classified as a Floribunda.  I can see that now, the profuse bloom and intense garden presence of the bush. 'Chuckles' is a continuous bloomer in my garden, rarely without a few eye-catching blossoms.

What I haven't been wrong on are all the parts that are dependent only on my eyes.  'Chuckles' is a low growing rose, about 3-4 foot tall at maturity in my garden, and almost 6 feet in diameter. The blooms are mostly single with 4 petals, but they are large in diameter, almost 4 inches across. The blooms are an eye-searing hot pink, a color that I did not like initially, but one that I've developed a taste for.  Each bloom also has a bit of white at the center, and they come in clusters, with new blooms, older blooms, and buds all visible in the same cluster as you can see in the picture above.  Stamens are golden on new blooms but fade quickly to brown.  There is little to no fragrance to the rose, but, then, nobody's perfect.  The bush is perfectly hardy here, in 5A/6B, and it is probably hardy far to the north since I saw it listed on a website named "LandscapeAlaska".  I never spray her for blackspot or other fungal diseases.  Look at that perfect foliage above;  glossy, dark green, and unspotted.  She's at peak right now in my garden, and has come into her own in this, her 6th year in my garden.

Most importantly of all, 'Chuckles' is one of the most aptly named roses of rosedom.  Anyone in her presence can't help but be cheered up by a single look of those bountiful bright pink and white blooms.  If I were to design a garden for a depressed friend, 'Chuckles' would be a necessity.  Heck, all of us could use one or two 'Chuckles' in the garden to cheer us up from time to time.