Isaac's Wife

'Madame Isaac Pereire'

While I'm on the subject of Old Garden Roses, one of the biggest mistakes that I've made in gardening (up until now) is to have waited this long before trying to grow 'Madame Isaac Pereire'.  This grand old lass is but a yearling in my garden, and her health, beauty and productivity is rapidly making me into an avid fan.

'Madame Isaac Pereire' is a dark pink Bourbon rose bred in France in 1881 by Armand Garcon.  The rose is named after Fanny Pereire, the wife of a prominent French banker, who used the inheritance after his death to honor his memory and simultaneously have this rose named after her.  In a very Continental twist, Pink Ladies and Crimson Gents reveals that Isaac Pereire was Fanny's uncle as well as her husband, a bit of salacious gossip that I somehow can't resist keeping in memory.

I was afraid of this rose, in my previous Zone 5B garden, because of her often-rating of Zone 6, and so I simply never applied Zonal Denial as a growing technique in her behalf.   But, come to find out, she did just fine as a one-summer-old unprotected shrub last Winter in my garden, and she's started back in this year without a pause.  Reputedly one of the most fragrant of all roses, I agree with the crowd about her strong bouquet, but I am insufficiently talented to confirm that tones of raspberry are prevalent in her ambiance as stated by others.  The very large and very double flowers are often quartered, and they hold their form as long or longer than most of the Bourbon class.  The bush form is sprawling, as you can see in the picture at the bottom of the blog, and I now understand first-hand why previous admirers like to stake her out in the garden to encourage bloom all along those long limbs.  I know that some consider her a short climber, with strong canes up to eight feet high, but I'm going to trim her as a shrub.  My specimen is a moderately vigorous bush, already this season pushing up 4 new large erect canes above the three foot level, and she's very healthy, with less than 10% of her unsprayed leaves bearing blackspot and with no noticeable defoliation.  I've seen no mildew on her matte green foliage here in Kansas.

She was sparing of her blooms in that first summer, and so, until recently, I believed her to be just another Bourbon, nothing special except exuding a decent fragrance.  What I hadn't anticipated are the rapid and bounteous rebloom cycles of this rose, making it the most prolific of my OGR's in terms of repeat flower production.  I'm encouraged now to look for 'Mme Ernst Calvat', a lighter pink sport with the same glorious fragrance.  The picture at the bottom is this year's first bloom cycle, but the second bloom cycle, now underway, is just as colorful and, because of the summer heat, even more fragrant.  One other secret I'll reveal about this rose;  this time of year, when Hybrid Tea and Floribunda blooms are bedraggled by wind, discolored by rain, and chewed by insects, my 'Mme Isaac Pereire' blooms still seem to be perfect, every one.  I don't know how she avoids the factors that disfigure the blooms of other roses, but she does.

I currently lack the knowledge and experience to tie down those long canes in gentle restraint, but perhaps this winter I'll borrow Fifty Shades of Grey from Mrs. ProfessorRoush and study it so that I can be properly prepared to restrain her (referring to 'Mme. Isaac Pereire') in the garden come next Spring.  This old gardener will try anything to encourage blooming of an Old Garden Rose.

Blackspot Susceptibility; Old Garden Roses

'Madame Hardy'

At last comes the third blog in my series reviews of roses for blackspot susceptibility.  Two Mondays ago I reported my Griffith Buck roses and last Monday it was the Canadians and Rugosas.   Since I also grow a fair group of Old Garden Roses (compared to some mythical average rosarian in my mind), I'll throw down on them in this third blog of the trio.  As before, the first number is the estimated percentage of leaves with blackspot and the second number the estimated percent defoliation.

Old Garden Roses:
Fantin Latour 60%-20%
Madame Hardy 0%-0%
Double Scotch White 0%-0%
Konigin Von Danemark 0%-0%
Comte de Chambord 0%-0%
La Reine Victoria 0%-0%
Zephirine Drouhin 5%-0%
Celsiana 0%-0%
Duchesse de Montebello 0%-0%
Charles de Mills 10%-15%
Louise Odier 5%-50%
Ballerina 30%-30%
Rose de Rescht 70%-5%
Variegata di Bologna 80%-10%
Red Moss (Henri Martin) 0%-20%
Salat 0%-5%
Duchesse de Rohan 0%-5%
Reine des Violettes 10%-10%
Madame Issac Pierre 10%-0%
Cardinal de Richelieu 0%-0%
Belle de Crecy <5%-5%
Blush Hip <5%-0%
Coquette de Blanches 5%-0%
Duchess of Portland 5%-0%
Frau Karl Druschki 10%-10%
Ferdinand Pichard <5%-0%
Shailor's Provence 0%-0%
Madame Plantier 0%-0%
Maiden's Blush 0%-0%
Seven Sisters 0%-0%
La France 20%-80% (not really an OGR, but the first Hybrid Tea).

This is normally a fairly blackspot-free group, but Fantin Latour got spotted up early and pretty badly, and Variegata di Bologna presently has a touch of the fungal flu.  As you would expect however, it is hard to go wrong with Old Garden Roses.  Most of our current disease troubles began after the breeding of 'La France'.  I grow 'La France' for conversations-sake only; if there was ever a balled-up, blackspot ridden rose, it is that first miserable offspring of crossing a Hybrid Perpetual with a Tea rose.  Why, oh why, did society ever decide that 'La France' was the future of roses?  For sheer gloriousness, I think the world went wrong and should have stayed with 'Madame Hardy', 'Duchesse de Montebello', and 'Madame Plantier'. Those are three classy old dames who can still show a gardener a good time.

Beetles! Get'cher Beetles Here!

Hey, You! Yeah, you, Fella!  Take a look at these!  Japanese Beetles for Sale!  These little green friendlies would love to hitch a ride into your garden and fornicate in it and make babies.  Cheap!  End of the Year Sale! Don't wait until they reach your area on their own!  Get'em NOW!

This morning, on a trip out of town, I innocently stopped at a large regional nursery about 60 miles east of Manhattan.  This nursery sells each Spring, among other plants, the largest variety of potted roses for a radius of 100 miles.   Being who I am, I could not help but stop to view their sale on the few remaining potted roses, hoping particularly to find a 'St. Swithun' marked down to a price that even a curmudgeonly rosarian would like.  And there, I saw them.  Japanese Beetles!  Fornicating in 'The Wedgwood Rose'!  And, looking around, they were on all the roses!  And the perennial hibiscus! And the daylilies (insert primal scream here)!  I took the pictures displayed here with my Iphone, to dispel doubting Thomas's and the likes of government types who claim that UFO's do not exist.

To understand the full depth of my horror and the stream of curses I uttered, you should be aware that Japanese Beetles are not yet endemic just 60 miles west, in Manhattan, Kansas, and I was unaware that they had been seen in anything but temporary outbreaks west of Kansas City.  You East-Coast rosarians should imagine, for a moment, an idyllic garden where you had never seen a Japanese Beetle, but you had heard they were massing at the seashore.  That is the fear that I've been living with for 5 or 6 years now, viewing the pictures of destruction at other gardens on the Internet and waiting for the beetle-induced Armageddon.

Fellow Gardeners, I am irate, nay, I am INCENSED at the callous disregard of this nursery for the public.  Questioning a worker at the store, "Yes", they did know that they had living, breeding Japanese beetles on the premises.  "They've been here for two or three years."  And "Yes" they had notified the authorities and were being monitored.  Why then, I wondered, were their embeetled roses and other plants still for sale?  How was it that they felt it was okay to participate in spreading these things around? I understand a conscientious gardener sticking to their organic principles and refusing to spray, but surely a commercial nursery wouldn't hesitate to nuke every inch of plant and soil.   One thing for sure, I wasn't buying any roses today.

Friends, this whole issue puts me deeply into an ethical and moral dilemma.  I have a vocal libertarian streak, distrusting authority of all kinds and advocating that petty little government dictators, (like Michael Bloomberg, currently trying to regulate the size of soft drinks at the movies in NYC), be exiled to Elba.  But I wished instantly and fervently on the spot that there was a government agency that would step into this void, tell this nursery they have to put up signs warning unknowing customers, and curtail sales to western customers.  Or better yet, depopulate and burn the nursery to the ground, as they have done in the past to farms with tuberculosis and brucellosis in their dairy herds.

I know, I know, eventually beetles will reach Manhattan Kansas on their own.  But I had a small hope that the Flint Hills would be a 50 mile-wide barrier to westward expansion; a no-beetle-land of poor food sources for their migration and extensive annual prairie fires to wipe out early scouts.  Little did I know that a nursery on the infested side of the zone would blatantly offer to sell me a potted plant with either beetle larvae in the soil or, in my case today, some actual beetle couples who would have been happy to have intercourse in my back seat during the Jeep ride home and then quickly disperse into my Beetle Eden of 200 rose plants.  Just as bad, I've bought plants from this nursery every year, my latest being a peony last August during a sale.  It has been long planted in my garden, all last Winter and this Spring, far too late to grub out now.  Until now I've tried, myself, to be a no-spray gardener, mostly faithful to the organic cause, but within seconds I was contemplating which insecticide I should use first.
  
I drove speedily home, calling friends and local nursery owners on the way like a Paul Revere of horticulture, spreading the word that the beetles were coming.  Local nursery owners were unaware and surprised at the disclosure.  Flashes of Kevin McCarthy screaming "They're here already! You're next!" at the ending of the classic movie The Invasion of the Body Snatcher's were running through my mind.  I came straight home and ran into my rose garden, inspecting every bloom for insects lounging in post-coital bliss, finally collapsing in relief as I determined that I'm still free from infection.  And then I took a long hot shower in disinfectant soap and burned my clothes.  You can never be too careful.