At Home With Old Roses : Gardens: Bob and Kathy Edberg sell flowering antiques. They tend 2,000 bushes at their Van Nuys nursery and another 900 in their yard.
Bob and Kathy Edberg work for a living. And after hours, they work some more, for enjoyment.
They root, pot, water and prune their collection of about 900 antique roses.
And on weekends the Edbergs tend to yet another flock of 2,000 rosebushes of 300 varieties that they sell at their Van Nuys nursery, Limberlost Roses.
With their number in the book and passed around among antique-rose fanciers, the telephone rings year-round with calls for the Edbergs’ unique potted roses.
According to Miriam Wilkins, originator of the Heritage Roses Group based in El Cerrito, the Edbergs are the only specialized suppliers of rare roses in Southern California.
Roses in this season, you think, are hardly rare. They are everywhere, their feet swaddled in wood shavings and plastic, their thorny limbs even sticking out between the florets of broccoli and bags of apples in the supermarket produce section.
But the rose world is one of many classes, and the ubiquitous canes are those of modern roses such as hybrid teas, floribundas or grandifloras, with new members created every season and quickly fading out of favor.
These modern roses “are meant to be cut back severely, so they flush with a new crop of perfectly coned flowers. They live fast, die young and have a beautiful-looking corpse,” said Bob Edberg.
And they have so lorded over the garden scene that to most people, a rose is something that comes in many colors and blooms throughout the growing season, with pointed buds opening into a stiff cornet of faintly scented petals.
What the old-rose aficionados search for so eagerly are the aristocrats of the rose world: bushy plants that often give a single but abundant crop of fragrant blooms a year, in shades of pink, red, white and sometimes yellow.
Shapes vary wildly, from single, simple blossoms, to large puffs nicknamed “cabbage roses,” or flowers with hundreds of petals tightly wrapped into quarters with a knot of minuscule petals at the center.
Such roses belong to a closed circle, classes called damask and centifolia--and their derivatives the moss roses--Gallica, Alba, China, tea, Bourbon, Portland and Noisette, all in existence before 1867, the date of introduction of the first hybrid tea, La France.
Although in ancient and medieval times Persians concocted perfumes with the damask roses, and the French with Gallicas, it is Josephine, wife of Napoleon, who, by creating her famous garden in 1799, launched the vogue for roses among well-heeled nobles of France and England.
Today the heritage roses have swung back into fashion, thanks in part to David Austin, a British hybridizer who crossed old roses with modern ones and obtained something that smelled and looked like an old rose but bloomed as often as a modern one.
Austin’s English roses gained the acceptance of finicky old-rose amateurs and caught the eye of gardeners, often tantalizing them into discovering the antique parents.
So, at Limberlost, you can happen on an Austin rose, or find yourself nose to thorn with Belle de Crecy, a Gallica rose from 1848 and named for the castle of Crecy, which belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, king of France.
And for about $14, you can take it home. By May, it will unfurl pink blooms that will slowly mature into violet and release a fragrance strong and typical of old roses.
Nice, but does it really justify the virulent rose-collecting passion that possessed Edberg decades ago and still drives him to acquire new plants every year?
This is a devotion that can burn a hole right through your bank account. Since 1966, when he started collecting, Edberg estimates that he has spent about $20,000 on roses.
The Edbergs, however, came up with a pleasant financing solution. “In 1981, we had over 500 roses in the ground and in pots. We’d been rooting cuttings for friends already, so we decided to go into business, and we have been expanding ever since,” Edberg said.
And buying still more and more roses. “My goal is to have at least one of each,” he said.
That will take time because, according to Clair Martin, curator of the rose collection at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, there are thousands of different old roses.
“Hybrid perpetuals alone number about 4,000, according to simple counts of names in catalogues,” Martin said.
Looks and scent are not the only attractions. There is also history. “You get curious about when a rose was bred, how it was named, why,” Edberg explained.
Take Souvenir de la Malmaison, a Bourbon rose raised in 1843 by the gardener of French Empress Josephine.
The story goes that the grand duke of Russia was visiting La Malmaison, loved the rose and took it back with him to St. Petersburg. There, he christened it to remember his journey to the French palace.
Or consider Sombreuil, a white climbing tea rose dating back to 1850. It is named for the daughter of a noble accused of treason and beheaded by the revolutionary regime of 18th-Century France.
Why the daughter? “She was made to choose between death and drinking some of her father’s blood. Being sensible, she drank,” Edberg said.
That should beat National Trust, Catherine Deneuve, and yes, even Dolly Parton and other modern roses.
The money earned by the Edbergs’ rose trade is poured right back into roses, or the antique books about wild and garden roses they consult to learn of otherwise unheard of old varieties.
Because reading about roses is common to old-rose hobbyists, Limberlost Roses now carries 10 titles. Among them are 10 copies of the rare 1936 first edition of “Old Garden Roses” by E.A. Bunyard, tagged at $131.50.
Besides being historians, rosarians are also rose “rustlers,” and even very respectable people such as Martin engage in this activity.
“I really like to go up to Northern California, in Gold Rush country and visit old cemeteries looking for old rose bushes, bring back a cutting and identify it,” Martin said.
Over the years Bob and Kathy Edberg have proven their interest in the preservation effort by finding old specimens any way possible, even importing some from England and putting them through the complicated but required two-year quarantine period.
And not just for selfish contemplation in their private garden. “A few years ago, I didn’t have any Infante de France,” a hybrid perpetual from 1860, Martin said. “Bob gave me a cutting to add to our collection.”
When novice gardeners hear of the rarity of some of these roses and admire the silk puff-like blooms, they might be inclined to leave it at that, thinking the plants are made for botanists to grow.
Nothing is further from the truth, according to Wilkins. “You don’t even have to prune them at all for the first three years,” she said.
As for planting, do the same as for modern roses: Dig a hole at least two feet wide and two feet deep, and fill it with good soil as you set the plant in.
Edberg contends that roses are even fairly drought resistant. “If you dig the planting hole deeply, the water will go directly to the roots. Just mulch generously with redwood compost in the spring,” he advised.
With diplomacy, you might get Limberlost’s owners to sheepishly confess their favorites. “Malmaison, because it does well here, blooms repeatedly with fragrant, well-quartered flowers, and because of the story behind it,” said Bob Edberg.
“Madame Ernst Calvat, an 1888 Bourbon, for sentimental reasons. It’s the first flower Bob brought to me before we were married,” said Kathy Edberg.
But some people ask too much, even of antique roses. “Two customers came once, demanding a rosebush of a certain height, blooming continuously, fragrant and whose petals would not blow off in the wind,” Kathy Edberg recalled.
That was too much. Rosarians can go back to the hybridizing table for that one.
Nothing, though, seems to jar the Edbergs’ affable mood when they are around roses. That’s the reason behind the name of their nursery.
“A Girl of the Limberlost” is the title of a children’s story published at the turn of the century about a child at play in a magical forest, away from a troubled world. “That’s how I feel when I am with roses,” Bob Edberg said.
Limberlost Roses, 16152 Saticoy St., Van Nuys, is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Call (818) 901-7798.
