Old Roses on the Rise : They Grow Alongside Other Flowers in This Pasadena Cottage Garden, but They Are Definitely in Control
DAY-TO-DAY life is orderly; the garden shouldn’t be,” says Alan Mittelstaedt, a Pasadena gardener who favors the casual, even disorderly look of a cottage garden to more formal plans--and who prefers the rumpled look of an old rose to the just-pressed look of a modern hybrid tea. Mittelstaedt has filled the yard of his 1920s cottage with more than 50 cultivars of roses, about two-thirds of them antique varieties, some centuries old. “I love the special fragrance of the old roses, especially the musks and rugosas,” he says. And he appreciates their informal flowers, casual arrays of petals that are far different from modern hybrid tea roses, which he describes as “arrogant plants with their picture-perfect flowers. Some aren’t even fragrant,” he says indignantly. “How could anyone breed a rose that is not fragrant?”
Old roses are on the rise. Several specialty nurseries now carry them in Southern California, and in the new Wayside Gardens Rose Catalog (Hodges, S.C. 29695-0001), old roses are listed before new roses--hybrid teas are at the very back of the book--a sign of changing times for roses.
In front of the Mittelstaedt cottage is a classic cottage garden, which, by definition, is a casual mix of flowers. “I’ve tried to make the garden look as far from manicured as possible,” says Mittelstaedt. “It should be as natural as it can be.”
To ensure the absence of straight lines, he laid out the large planting areas with a garden hose, letting its curves determine the outline of the beds. Inside the outline, he dug out the existing St. Augustine lawn and generously amended the soil with bags of redwood compost to give the roses a good start. Mittelstaedt soon found that even those beds were not big enough.
In California’s mild climate, most old roses grow much larger than they do elsewhere. “The catalogue said that ‘Souv. de la Malmaison’ would grow to 3 or 4 feet. But mine was soon over 8. Four-foot roses such as ‘Boule de Neige’ grew to 12 feet.” Mittelstaedt’s remedy for exuberant growth was to train the tallest roses like giant blackberries, on rustic but sturdy trellises made of 8-foot poles, 3 inches in diameter. More of the same poles were used to make crosspieces, to which and the roses are tied. The roses growing on these posts are mostly Bourbons (such as ‘Souv. de la Malmaison,’ developed in 1843) and Hybrid Perpetuals (such as ‘Frau Karl Druschki,’ a 1901 German rose). Every few years, he cuts off, in a casual manner, the top 2 or 3 feet. Otherwise, he does little to the old roses. (The modern roses get a once-a-year pruning.)
Old roses are not pest- or disease-free, though many gardeners erroneously reason that if the plants lasted this long, they must not be susceptible. “I almost took out ‘Deuil de Paul Fontaine’ (moss rose, 1873) because it had black spot all year long,” Mittelstaedt says. “It also flowered all year long, so I figured if he could live with it, so could I.”
Another venerable rose myth is that they only flower once, in the spring. That’s true with a few, but in the Mittelstaedt garden most roses flower off and on all year long. “ ‘Mme. Hardy’ (white Damask, 1832) and ‘Rosa Mundi’ (a red-striped Gallica of unknown but ancient age) are the only two that bloom but once in spring that I know of, but then ‘Boule de Neige’ (a Bourbon from 1867, pure white, strong fragrance) blooms all the time.”
Mittelstaedt started with 20 favorite roses, and he now grows more than 40 roses in the front garden, another dozen in back. Rugosas outnumber the rest--Peter Beales’ book “Classic Roses” describes them as “able to grow almost anywhere without mollycoddling, and (will) provide flowers throughout the summer.”
However, Mittelstaedt still has a long way to go to catch up with his father’s collection. “My father was a Lutheran minister, and there was a great deal of land behind the parsonage in Tujunga where he grew three or four hundred roses,” Mittelstaedt recalls. “Most of these came from his friend, John H. van Barneveld, who would show up in the middle of the night with a station wagon full of roses that hadn’t sold well.”
Many of the leftovers he brought were old roses, which in the 1950s--the golden age of the modern hybrid tea--were under-appreciated. Van Barneveld was one of the first to grow old roses commercially in California, and he listed several hundred in his 1955 California Roses catalogue under the heading “Roses of Yesterday but of Great Value Today.”
Growers again agree with Van Barneveld’s assessment. His nursery is gone, but gardeners intrigued by the imperfect blooms and sweet scents of old roses can find them at places such as Sassafras in Topanga, Limberlost in Van Nuys, Burkards in Pasadena and Country Bloomers in Orange.
