GARDENING : Austins: Ramblin’ Roses That O.C. Has Grown to Love
The closest thing to perfection on earth, a growing number of gardeners believe, is any David Austin rose. The English hybridizer, they say, creates roses that combine the sumptuous shapes, romantic colors and head-swooning fragrances of old rose varieties such as Damasks and Centifolias with the repeat blooming characteristics and disease resistance of modern floribundas and hybrid teas.
“Austins are having your cake and eating it too,” says Lew Whitney, president of Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, one of the first nurseries to introduce these varieties to Southern California.
If Austins have any fault, in fact, it’s that they do almost too well here. Bred in foggy, old England, these roses take off like Jack’s beanstalk under our perpetually sunny skies.
“The first year we planted Austins was quite a learning experience,” recalls Clair Martin, curator of the rose garden at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, which now sports the largest collection of Austins in the country. “The ‘Charles Austin’ we planted in March, for example, which the catalogue said would grow to 3 feet, was 12 feet by August. Everything got double or triple the size it was supposed to.”
One solution for dealing with this exuberance is to prune these roses aggressively.
Whitney of Roger’s, for example, prunes back his Austins after every bloom cycle as well as in late winter. Martin at the Huntington has also discovered that many Austins are none the worse for hard pruning. “You can’t do this to all of them, though,” he warns. “ ‘Heritage,’ for instance, resents it and stops blooming. It’s trial and error.”
Another approach local gardeners have begun experimenting with is taking advantage of the Austins’ urge to surge by converting them into climbers.
Jan Zalba of San Clemente, gardening instructor at South Coast Botanical and the Los Angeles Arboretum, reports several successes of this nature among her students. One, she says, is training ‘Graham Thomas,’ a glorious yellow, cup-shaped rose, over an arbor; another is coaxing ‘Charmian,’ a sweetly scented medium pink, to scramble up a tree. Both gardeners have been pleased with initial results, says Zalba.
Probably the most ambitious experiment of this sort taking placing anywhere in Southern California, though, is in the Brisa del Lago condominium project in Rancho Santa Margarita, where dozens of varieties of Austins are being trained to climb the 700-foot-long stucco wall that separates the complex from an adjacent shopping center. Austins are also being used to arch over entrance ways to the units. The English roses were put in at different stages, and the oldest have now been in the ground for three years. The results look promising.
“I’m very impressed,” says Whitney, who was given a tour of the project in late April by Kevin Cartwright, the member of the board of directors of Brisa’s homeowners’ association who suggested planting the roses.
“I’ve never seen Austins grown as climbers before,” says Whitney, “but now I’d like to try it myself. If Kevin can get these results on a north-facing wall, I’d like to see what would happen on a sunny southern exposure. I thought ‘Cymbelene’ (a big loose-petaled white blushed with pink) looked especially good.”
Cartwright, director of public affairs at the Richard Nixon Library, is a longtime rose aficionado and one of the volunteers who tend the rose gardens at the Huntington. It was there that he was first exposed to David Austins.
When the developers of the shopping center adjacent to Brisa de Lago put in a sound wall between the center and the condominiums, says Cartwright, they gave the homeowners’ association funds for re-landscaping. The board’s first priority, he says, was planting something that would cover a good portion of the wall to give the residents whose units faced it something pleasing to look at.
“Having fallen in love with Austins at the Huntington, I persuaded the board to let me try them as climbers on one section,” Cartwright says. “When the roses came into bloom the first time, the response was overwhelming. So there was no resistance from the board to expanding the experiment.”
John Snodgrass, another Brisa board member, confirms Cartwright’s assessment.
“Everybody loves the roses,” he says. “The landscaping was mostly variations of green before. Having some color to look at is really great.”
He likes the roses’ rambling look, too.
“Southern California landscaping often looks over-manicured to me,” he says. “This softens things. It reminds me of the roses back East.”
The Austin project has spurred a growing interest in roses throughout the complex, Snodgrass has noticed. “My wife and I have four in pots on the patio ourselves, and I have seen others trying them. Maybe we should really promote that, now that I think of it. Brisa could become the rose garden of Rancho Santa Margarita. We’re off to a good start already.”
Martin, Whitney and others Austin pioneers in Southern California will be watching the Brisa experiment with interest meanwhile.
“I’m not sure if Austins will make the best climbers or not,” says the Huntington’s Martin. “They may not break (produce blooms at their lateral buds when bent horizontally) as well as other roses. But it’s definitely an idea worth trying. If I had room, I’d try it with ‘Abraham Darby’ myself.”
Gardening instructor Zalba takes a somewhat contrary position. “I think there are a lot of Austins that are going to prove best as climbers or pegged,” she says.
“The thing about Austins, though, is that they all have different heritage, so they’re not going to behave alike. We’ll have to try them all out different ways to see how to get the most out of them under Southern California growing conditions, and then share the information with each other.”
Kevin Cartwright will be sharing information about growing David Austins as climbing roses at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda, today. For more information, call (714) 993-5075.
