Blame the Weather If Your Roses Were Disappointing
Blame the weather, but the last few years haven’t been the best for roses. Drought, heat, cold, and then a summer that stayed cool and overcast, all took their toll.
Roses bloomed at odd times, or didn’t bloom at all. Armies of mites attacked roses one year, waves of aphids the next. Bright orange rust worked on the undersides of leaves, while mildew powdered the tops. Some gardeners even had black spot on their roses, a disease seldom seen on the West Coast.
It got so bad in my own garden that a few roses were completely leafless by late summer. I actually found myself making plans to dig them all up in the fall and plant something else.
Should we give up? I think not yet. Roses simply offer too much. Few plants bloom as often--during more normal weather--and few flowers look so good or last as long in a bouquet. Even in a totally drought-resistant garden, roses would be worth growing in a bed of their own, where they could get extra water, just for cutting.
In fact, roses are very common all around the Mediterranean in gardens that are infrequently watered. “Indeed, in hot dry climates, they do so well and flower so profusely that they tend to have a shorter life, especially if not allowed to rest in summer. If deprived of water they will become dormant and summer deciduous, but they will flower again in the fall. Summer is therefore regarded as a resting season” (from “The Mediterranean Gardener,” by Hugo Latymer, Barrons, New York; $35).
Though I know of no one who has tried summer dormancy in California, plenty have gotten through the drought so far by simply giving roses a little more water, saving it elsewhere in the garden. So even if the drought continues, there is a place for roses is the garden.
Though the drought probably exacerbated the pest and disease problems these last few years, other aspects of the weather were more to blame. The endless overcast of summer made rust and mildew rampant. Both fungus diseases like cool, moist weather.
Tom Carruth, the rose breeder at Weeks (a large, wholesale rose grower), said he saw the normally disease-free variety named Voodoo covered with both. He also had a midwinter suggestion for getting the jump on these two problems.
He suggested raking up and sending to the dump all the fallen leaves and perhaps even any mulch around the plants, then spraying the plants, and the surrounding soil, with an old-fashioned dormant spray (available at nurseries).
Use one that contains smothering oils for any overwintering pests and a fungicide for the diseases. When you prune (best done mid-February), send the prunings to the dump and cut out any old, sickly stems.
Plants that have disease problems year after year, not just this summer, should probably be replaced with more disease resistant varieties. Carruth says that this is a major goal of rose breeders today. “You will be seeing more and more disease resistant roses because using chemicals to control them is going to be more difficult in the future as more and more are banned.”
Clair Martin at the Huntington says that one of the new AARS roses is indeed very disease resistant. Their four plants have never been sprayed and he calls ‘All That Jazz’ “impervious.” ’All That Jazz,’ developed by Jerry Twomey down in Leucadia, is a sherbet-orange shrub rose. Martin says it makes a four-foot-around ball and flowers from the ground up.
It’s quite different, but for those who think that most of the new roses these last few years have been rather poor, or simply more of the same, Carruth says things are picking up.
There have been a lot of changes in the rose business, and gardeners’ tastes have changed, but exciting new roses are coming. He says there will be more “novelty” roses and points to the striped or “Color Splash” roses in the Jackson & Perkins catalogue (to order a catalogue, call (800) 292-4760). These are pink, purple or orange roses splashed with contrasting white.
He says that fragrance will return with a vengeance (“it’s near the top of every breeder’s list”), that there will be some outstanding new yellows, and a lot more good shrub roses like ‘Bonica.’ And, they will all be more disease resistant.
In the meantime, there are plenty of older roses to choose from (at least one Pasadena nursery is offering 200 kinds this year), and there are the new Austin roses that look like antique roses. More nurseries are carrying the Austin or English roses this year, though many will sell them in containers and wait until spring to put out their stock.
Right now it’s time to buy and plant roses sold dormant or bare root. For bare-root plants to succeed they must be fresh and have plenty of roots, so be wary of bargain plants and don’t hesitate to take back plants that are short of roots.
Nurseries can give you a sheet of instructions on how to plant bare-root roses (it’s a little different) and you might consider adding a soil polymer (Broadleaf P-4 and Agrosoke are two) around the roots to help the plants through their first few years. Polymers hold extra water that roses appreciate.
Armstrong Garden Centers is giving out “rose chimneys” with each bare root plant. These are open-ended cardboard boxes that you put around the rose and fill with damp sawdust. You only leave them on a few weeks but they protect the bare plants from sun or Santa Anas and one salesmen swears it has cut their return of dead roses by 80%. A good idea.
I for one am not giving up on roses and this weekend I’ll be out there planting (unless, of course, it rains). I am replacing a few disease-prone bushes with others that I hope will bloom right through summer, with no rust and no mildew, and no spraying. And, if it doesn’t rain a lot (my fingers are crossed), I may try letting them go dormant in summer like they do in that other Mediterranean climate.
