Breeder’s Life Is a Bed of Prize Roses

In the rarefied world of commercial rose breeding, Thousand Oaks resident Keith Zary is a budding celebrity.

Within the last month he has won a trio of major European awards in England, the Netherlands and Germany, including the President’s International Trophy of the Royal National Rose Society.

Zary is only the second breeder from the U.S. to ever win the prestigious English award.

To do that in a hallowed horticultural mecca that reveres roses is like a Brit crossing the pond to show a Southern Californian how to design a decent freeway.

“I would think they are very shocked,” said Tommy Cairns, a genial Los Angeles-based Scotsman who is president-elect of the American Rose Society. “That’s as good as trying to raise the Stars and Stripes over Buckingham Palace.”

Zary also took home the coveted Golden Rose of The Hague in the Netherlands--the first U.S. breeder to do so since 1955--an honor made all the more significant by the fact it is bestowed on a commercial breeder by his peers, a clubby group of perhaps a dozen or so experts from around the world.

And to top it off, in a sudden flowering of populist glory, Zary’s face will soon be peering from the pages of People magazine as the creator of the official “Diana, Princess of Wales Rose.”

The cream rose with a pink blush debuted Tuesday with a ceremonial planting in the rose garden of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.

American gardeners can purchase the $24.95 shrub later this year--perhaps planting it alongside their John F. Kennedy or Barbara Bush rosebush--with a portion of the proceeds going to the memorial fund set up in the name of the late princess.

“In terms of a choice of honoring the woman, it’s a good one,” Zary said. “I think the rose is pretty symbolic of her: It is tall and stately.”

From Beans to Roses

All this is heady stuff for an unassuming scientist who has toiled for more than a decade in the well-tended obscurity of an unmarked rose research facility at the end of a nondescript country road in the rolling Somis hills.

Seated in his wood-hewn office at Bearcreek Gardens, the soft-spoken Zary looks more like a bank manager than someone literally savoring the sweet smell of success.

Zary, who holds a doctorate in horticulture from Texas A&M; University, is vice president of the research facility for Jackson & Perkins, the world’s largest rose company, headquartered in Medford, Ore.

But the laid-back company banished ties and suits several years ago and Zary’s business uniform of choice is work boots, jeans and a polo shirt emblazoned with the company logo.

With the vestiges of a clipped Canadian accent that remains from his Saskatchewan youth, the 49-year-old Zary allows with only the merest glint in an eye that he is “a late-bloomer” in rose breeding circles.

Indeed, he began his career with a five-year stint as a bean breeder in Minnesota.

Seeking a greater challenge, he joined Jackson & Perkins in 1985 after 18 months of salary negotiations--helped considerably by the fact the company hired and fired two predecessors during the period.

“I’ve always been fond of plants,” he said. “My experience with plants growing up is that they were a hell of a lot of work.”

They still are.

The pastoral 20 acres of greenhouses and gardens in which he labors belie the ruthless pressures of rose breeding.

Zary has sole responsibility for 400,000 varieties of roses the company grows each year. Most have as much chance of making the big leagues as the typical Little League ball player.

From those, 2,000 to 3,000 are propagated and stringently evaluated for everything from disease resistance to bloom profusion. The hardiest and most spectacular of those are further winnowed to the 100 or so blooms presented to the company’s marketing department each year.

Only a handful is deemed good enough to appear in glossy company catalogs, where rose devotees may choose from plants with such evocative names as Fragrant Lace, Moon Shadow and Taboo.

The roses that won him honors abroad don’t yet have names and are unavailable to the public.

The British award came for a purple rose with a white center, the Dutch prize for a creamy-pinkish rose that blooms in clusters, and the Casino Award of Baden-Baden for a bicolor salmon hybrid.

“It’s a battle,” Zary said. “It’s a war of attrition. Who will survive all of those climates, all of those diseases, and make it?”

A Hybrid of Science and Art

That the conflict is an amalgam of art and science is reflected in the volumes lining Zary’s office bookshelves, where such weighty tomes as “Methods in Chloroplast Biology” lie alongside titles like “The Quest for the Rose.”

Biotechnical engineering is making inroads in a field still in its infancy despite more than 130 years of breeding.

But it is the intangible combination of innovation and passion that makes Zary a consummate rose breeder, Cairns said.

“He has the [scientific] skills to make the right cross, but he also has the artistic skills to pick the one that’s going to look great,” he said.

“You’ve got to understand, the science of plant inheritance is not that well understood. When you cross two roses, maybe one seed in 10,000 may have some perfect qualities about it. Part of it is having the intuitive eye and sense of seeing that first bloom and knowing it’s something great.”

Another part of it is having the patience to wait for the work to grow into something special.

The rose business has a long lead time. Only in the last few years have most of Zary’s creations become available to the public.

So Zary must be part seer as well, looking far into the future to anticipate consumer trends and scientific advances.

“That was the big joke when I signed on--that I have 10 years to prove myself,” he said. “It’s hard work to look at each of those plants and decide whether it’s going to live or die. You want to avoid making mistakes. It’s critical to where this company is going to be in 10 years.”

With tens of millions of dollars riding on Zary’s hunches--the company ships more than 3 million roses and other plants to customers each year--this is no business for those with a lack of confidence.

Along with the economic responsibility comes the weighty burden of tradition and heritage. In a 126-year-old company whose main product is a simple bloom, Zary is only the fourth breeder.

“[Roses] have this truly magnificent flower,” he said. “They have the most divine fragrance. They have almost every color. They bloom repeatedly . . . . I don’t think there’s a more beautiful flower in the world.”

Despite his recent triumphs, Zary has only begun.

As the pace of scientific advances picks up, he anticipates a tantalizing future filled with new techniques to create new hybrids.

He is, for instance, aiding a Japanese-Australian partnership in the creation of a blue rose. Such a bloom would be fun, he concedes, but his real interest is in adding the trait to his scientific and artistic palette to create startlingly different color combinations.

“He’s only at the beginning of a very long and productive career,” Cairns said. “He is also a dreamer and pioneer in that he believes the evolution of the rose can go on and create new forms and shapes . . . . He has the patience, the persistence and the wisdom to stick with the plant. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg today.”