Roses of a Different Stripe

Every January, nurseries fill up with bare-root rosebushes because it’s the best time (and the least expensive way) to buy and plant a rose.

The most talked-about roses every year are the latest All-America Rose Selection award winners, which have undergone rigorous evaluation in 46 test gardens around the country.

Two of the four 1999 AARS roses were developed in Upland by breeder Tom Carruth, known as Mr. Stripe to rosarians. “Ah, there’s Mr. Stripe,” they say at rose shows and gatherings.

The title is intended to be honorary and recognizes that Carruth, 46, has been making a name for himself with striped roses ever since his first, ‘Scentimental.’ The striking 1997 AARS rose looks like a piece of cellophane-wrapped peppermint candy. It smells good too, hence the name.

This year, Carruth hybridized a striped climbing rose that has to be seen to be believed. It’s striped and splashed with specks of red on white and is the first climber to win an AARS award in 23 years.

This is no half-hearted climber either. It will cover a chain-link fence with gusto, and Carruth guesses the rose will spread to between 15 and 18 feet at maturity.

Appropriately, this explosion of patriotic color is named ‘Fourth of July.’ The parents are ‘Roller Coaster’ and ‘Altissimo,’ from which the new rose gets the trait of not fading like a sparkler as it ages. It stays bright until the end, when the petals fall cleanly away.

‘Fourth of July’ will bloom several times in its first season but won’t start growing like a climber until near the end of that season.

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Carruth’s other 1999 winner is affectionately named ‘Betty Boop’ after the cartoon character, who is celebrating her 70th birthday. This rose is not striped but multicolored, an ivory-white bloom with a touch of yellow at its center, edged in blushing red.

The parents of ‘Betty Boop’ are two of the most colorful roses around--’Playboy’ and ‘Picasso’--and it is “sure to be the first rose to flower in your garden and the fastest to repeat,” Carruth says. It is almost always in bloom and does best if you don’t deadhead it. That should be welcome news for those who hate cutting off the fading flowers on roses. With ‘Betty Boop,’ new blooms will quickly cover the old.

Winning two AARS awards is right up there with Mark McGwire hitting 70 home runs, only it takes longer than a season to accomplish.

These two roses were each hybridized back in 1989. Carruth saw the first flowers in 1990 and was so impressed that he still remembers exactly where the seedling rose sat on the crowded greenhouse bench.

“It takes nine to 11 years to bring a new AARS rose onto the market,” he said. “We must evaluate the rose and grow enough stock to supply 200,000 to 500,000 plants.” (AARS award-winning plants must be shared with all suppliers, even other rose companies.) “Remember, we only start with one.”

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A mail-order deal offered by the long-defunct Interstate Nurseries got Carruth started with roses in his hometown of Pampa, Texas. If you bought nine roses (the supplier’s choice), you got one free ‘Peace’ rose.

Carruth sold seeds door to door and washed windows at his dad’s Phillips 66 station to earn enough money to buy the roses.

It “was a real trial,” but he learned how to garden in the tough Panhandle soil. He was only 11.

“I was a strange little kid who really loved plants,” he said.

Carruth also discovered that he really liked plant genetics, which he studied at Texas A&M.; When he asked one of his favorite agriculture professors, J.C. Raulston, if he thought it was possible to make a living breeding ornamental plants instead of edibles, Raulston “laughed and said I could always do that after I got home from my real job.”

Carruth recalled, “My father was convinced I’d spend my life in poverty.”

He received his master’s degree in 1975 after breeding cucumbers that would make multiple flowers (so they’d produce more cukes) in a program sponsored by the Pickle Packers of America. During this time, he was working under a leading plant breeder, Dr. Leonard Pike.

“We were Pike’s Pickle Packers,” Carruth joked.

When a fellow graduate student tossed away an employment application from Jackson & Perkins roses, Carruth asked whether he could have it, fishing it out of the wastebasket.

Right out of college in 1976, he went to work for renowned rose breeder Bill Warriner at Jackson & Perkins. Warriner developed many AARS roses, including ‘America,’ ‘Color Magic’ and ‘Medallion,’ and even swept the 1980 awards with ‘Love,’ ‘Honor’ and ‘Cherish.’

After four years, Carruth went to Armstrong Roses and worked with Jack Christensen, another noted breeder of AARS and other roses, including some of the first striped roses, ‘Peppermint Twist’ and ‘Purple Tiger.’

After seven years, Armstrong Roses (no connection to the Armstrong retailer) was sold to a French corporation, and in 1988 Carruth went to Weeks Roses, which had recently been purchased from founder O.L. Weeks by two former Armstrong employees. (Ollie Weeks with Herb Swim developed the quintessential rose, ‘Mr. Lincoln.’)

For two years, while Weeks Roses’ operation was being moved to Upland, Carruth helped sell roses until he could begin breeding roses in the new greenhouses and trial grounds.

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Weeks Roses’ new headquarters is actually not new at all but the Sunkist Old Baldy Citrus Assn. packing house, built in the teens or ‘20s. Remnants of the colorful blue-and-orange Sunkist sign remain in the cavernous room where they now pack and ship roses.

Bare-root roses are stacked in the huge basement, where crates of oranges formerly resided. Weeks Roses is a wholesale grower that ships to nurseries all over the country.

In the shiny new greenhouses outside, helped by research foreman Raymond Aguilar and greenhouse technician Bobbie Boyd, Carruth makes the roughly 24,000 crosses it takes to produce a new rose, which makes their $10-to-$16 selling price for a new AARS rose a real deal.

There are also plenty of roses around his 1923 Spanish-Mediterranean home in Altadena, which he shares with partner John Furman. Reblooming irises, daylilies and many rare plants share these beds.

“It’s a collector’s garden,” he said, full of “mostly new and untried plants.” It’s also full of fountains and fish ponds.

Carruth has bred and introduced 25 roses in the last 19 years. Of these, four are striped.

His first AARS rose was striped, but this year’s winner may be his last striper.

“I won’t have any more stripers for a while,” he said, “but the die is cast. I’m stuck with Mr. Stripe.”

So what’s his favorite rose? F676-1. It’s a royal purple shrub rose yet to be introduced.

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Other New Roses for 1999

Additional AARS winners:

* ‘Kaleidoscope’: “Shrublet” rose with multicolored, golden-tan blooms that fade to lavender.

* ‘Candelabra’: Grandiflora with red-orange flowers.

Generosa French roses:

* ‘Claudia Cardinale’: Upright shrub with frilly, old-fashioned, fragrant, egg-yolk yellow blossoms.

* ‘Sonia Rykiel’: Medium-size bush with elaborate quartered coral-pink blooms.

Romantica French roses:

* ‘Traviata’: Hybrid tea with vibrant red, peony-like blooms.

* ‘Jean Giono’: Hybrid tea with old-fashioned, many-petaled flowers.

Austin English roses:

* ‘Pat Austin’ (available for the first time at nurseries): Rosette-shaped, soft yellow to apricot flowers with a strong tea scent.

Also:

* ‘Fragrant Apricot’: Floribunda rose with fragrant apricot to yellow flowers.

* ‘Billy Graham’: Hybrid tea with big, soft pink blooms.

* ‘Purple Simplicity’: Hedge rose with raspberry-purple blooms.

* ‘Melody Parfumee’: Hybrid tea with fragrant, plum-colored flowers.