Nurseries Abuzz as Gardeners Flit From Rose to Rose
Weep for the rest of the country.
The Northeast is chilly and gray and the only gardening you can do is indoors or in your mind.
January is the dark night of the gardener’s soul in New York City, where people who love to dig in the dirt and watch their backyards bloom must content themselves with the colorful but second-rate consolation of seed catalogs.
Not us. Here in the Valley the nurseries and garden centers are full of pansies, anemones and other winter bloomers. And best of all, bare-root roses.
Unlike young roses in cans, bare-roots are pure potential, an act of faith in the form of a spindly promise of dozens of roses tomorrow.
This week Ingrid Brown exercised one of the genuine perks of being an Angeleno and arrived early at the Armstrong Garden Center in Sherman Oaks.
The store is not far from Brown’s home, which she intended to brighten by planting a few flats of winter annuals. For the frontyard, she was in the market for pansies or violas.
“Last year we did pinks and purples,” she recalled. “This year I’m going to go for yellows and oranges.”
Blueberries were also on her shopping list, as was a bare-root replacement for one of the purple roses she prefers. One of her Sterling Silver roses had died, and she was considering such lavender alternatives as Stainless Steel.
Brown said she likes to come to Armstrong’s because they are able to provide her with so much information about the plants she buys, allowing her to try new varieties.
“I went to Home Depot and bought the manure and all the things they have better prices on, but for specialty plants, I come here,” she said. “This is full service and that’s no service.”
Jeff Lieberman, the store’s manager, prides himself on stocking plants that do especially well in the Valley. The white rose Honor, for instance, thrives in the Valley “but it doesn’t cross the hill well,” Lieberman says. John F. Kennedy is just the opposite, preferring Santa Monica to Sherman Oaks. Lieberman doesn’t carry bare-root almond or cherry trees, even though customers ask for them, because they fail to thrive here.
This year, he says, bare roots have been flying out of the store. He says he has sold 400 Iceberg roses (“a great landscape shrub”) alone. Indeed, he has Iceberg roses climbing a wall in his own garden, where he is about to plant some pink Weeping China Doll, a shorter, cascading variety.
Roses named for celebrities are all the rage now. Lieberman says he has sold out of both the yellow John John rose and the purple Barbra Streisand. “It was here for just a fleeting moment,” he recalls.
But the celebrity rose business can be fickle. Take the rose named Barbara Bush.
“She’s a beautiful rose,” he says. “Don’t laugh. But there are people who won’t put it in because of the name. The same with Barbra Streisand.”
After visiting Armstrong’s, I called Lili Singer, the gardening guru who works and gardens in Van Nuys, for some winter gardening tips.
Although we haven’t had much rain so far, she reminds that you shouldn’t walk on or dig in wet soil, especially the clay soil so common in the Valley. It will become compacted and concrete-like. Soil so damaged is “hard to repair,” she says. “That’s why people put nice little stepping stones in their gardening areas or put down planks.”
And, like our bloom-deprived Eastern friends, we should be thinking about spring, she says. Now’s the time to sit down with your seed catalogs and gardening books to plan your upcoming gardens. It’s not too early to buy seed. You can start seeds now for planting later--everything from petunias and coreopsis to squash and cucumbers.
And there are some vegetables you can plant now.
“You have this little window before it gets too hot,” says Singer, who says this is the time to sow seeds for leaf lettuces, carrots and other root vegetables, parsley, dill and cilantro. It’s too late, however, for peas. They should have been planted in September.
This is a great time to prune your roses if you haven’t already done so, she advises. But she counsels local growers of the new shrub roses, including Iceberg and the David Austin varieties, that they need very light to no pruning. “The less you prune, the more flowers you will have, but they will have shorter stems,” she says.
A light hand with the pruning shears will produce a lovely landscape plant. Prune back too far, and you may produce perfect long-stem roses, but on an unsightly plant.
She suggests doing what the gardeners at the Huntington do, cutting your rosebushes back to 36 inches, not a draconian 18 to 24 inches.
She also has this advice for people who are currently shopping for bare-root roses. We’ve had warm, dry weather, and you don’t want to buy bare roots that are already beginning to grow without benefit of soil and nutrients.
“You want to look for plants that have little or no growth,” she says. You want plants that have newly arrived at the nursery (ask the staff). And she recommends buying only the top grade of roses--No. 1’s--which have unblemished, fat and healthy looking canes.
Once you buy your bare-root roses, get them into the ground as soon as possible.
“Ideally, you should plant them the day you bring them home,” she says. “If you can’t plant them right away, put them in a bucket of water in the shade.”
All the Armstrong Garden Centers, including the one at 12920 Magnolia Blvd. in Sherman Oaks, will hold rose pruning workshops Saturday and Jan. 22 at 10:30 a.m.
Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.
