Making the Cut
Around 5:30 on a summer morning--while the sun is still behind the San Gabriel Mountains--Jacob Maarse will cut between 500 and 1,000 blooms from his Sierra Madre rose garden. He won’t be bringing them into his house (though his wife, Clara, makes sure some end up there); he will cart them down to his well-known eponymous Pasadena floral shop.
From April into December, he will cut at least this many every day. Maarse, you see, believes that home-grown roses are far superior to the kinds normally available to florists.
Maarse should know the value of home-grown roses--he comes from a long line of Dutch growers in Aalsmeer, Holland--a place known for its roses and its flower market. He opened Jacob Maarse Florist in 1966.
He thinks gardeners who aren’t growing at least a few roses just for cutting and arranging should reconsider.
Home-grown roses are prettier, last longer and come in more exciting colors than typical florist-shop fare. (And they are less expensive: $75 buys a dozen imported long stems; it buys a bouquet of 15 to 20 garden blooms.) He only wishes he could grow more than the 2,500 bushes that fill his 3-acre garden.
When looking at a dense bouquet of the garden rose “Yves Piaget,” it’s easy to see his point. This is one of the recent Romantica roses, which have old-fashioned frilly blooms and a powerful fragrance, yet grow stiff and upright with long stems like a hybrid tea.
“It’s a rose that wants to be a peony,” said Maarse. He likes it so much he’s devoted two 10-by-20-foot beds to this mauve pink rose. (Most of his beds are mixed.) It makes spectacular bouquets.
Because the flowers hide the rose foliage, Maarse likes to add some contrast with glossy camellia foliage, also from his garden. Pittosporums are another garden shrub he uses to provide some green.
His garden has all the normal furnishing--hedges, shrubs, trees, some lawn, other flowers--but roses are everywhere. To fit in a few more, Maarse even briefly considered using a row of roses in big pots on the tennis court instead of a net.
Because he has so many, the plants, at about 3 feet apart, are a little closer together than is ideal. They were happier, he said, when they were about 4 feet apart.
Although 1,000 cut flowers a day sounds like a lot, a good-sized wedding can consume 18,000 roses, so Maarse still must depend on cut stems from Ecuador or Holland, where most of florist roses are grown. But since imported roses are in transit for about four days, Maarse’s home-grown flowers always outlast them. If roses cut from the garden are put into water with a sugary bloom preservative, Maarse says they should last a good 10 days.
Surprisingly, if he had his choice, he would pick his blooms in the late afternoon, rather than the morning, since he says that sugars manufactured by the plant during the day will have plumped up the petals and help sustain the cut rose.
He makes his cuts just above the third five-part leaf, counting down from the flower. This may sound mysterious, but if you look carefully at a rose stem, you will see that there are two kinds of leaf clusters--those with three leaflets and those with five leaflets.
If you make cuts just above the five-part leaves, the new growth will be thicker and stronger, the stems longer.
As for deciding when to cut a bloom, Maarse said the more petals a rose has, the longer he waits. Also, he waits until many-petaled blooms are partially open before cutting them. The fat buds often won’t open after being cut.
While some roses are grown for their flowers and buds, a flower like “Yves Piaget” is grown only for its sumptuous blooms; its fat buds often don’t open and are not particularly graceful or attractive. The “Olympiad,” on the other hand, is known for its shapely buds (though its handsome blooms can’t compare to the breathtaking “Yves Piaget.”)
No commercial rose will open as gracefully as a garden-grown rose, said Maarse, yet another reason why he prefers to grow his own.
As for producing roses with long stems (for which florist roses are known), Maarse is able to achieve a similar effect by cutting the plants back hard in winter. He prunes the dormant roses so they have only a few, fresh, fat canes that are only a foot tall. The roses are not as bushy as they could be but they produce much better flowers for cutting.
Maarse’s roses are irrigated with a drip system, by hand and overhead; they’re fertilized with slow-release pellets and are regularly sprayed for mites in summer and mildew in spring. With all this care, if a rose doesn’t do well, or doesn’t last more than a few seasons, he yanks it out. “If it’s not enjoying itself, out it comes,” he said. “I don’t run an infirmary for sick roses.”
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The Best of the Blooms Jacob Maarse’s 14 favorite garden roses for cutting:
* ‘Brigadoon’ (red, pink and cream)
* ‘Dolly Parton’ (“most fragrant” red)
* ‘Double Delight’ (red and white)
* ‘Love’ (red and cream)
* ‘Medallion’ (gold)
* ‘Mon Cheri’ (pink turning to red)
* ‘Olympiad’ (red)
* ‘Paradise’ (purplish)
* ‘Peace’ (yellow-edged pink)
* ‘Pink Peace’ (rosy pink)
* ‘Pristine’ (white)
* ‘Scentimental’ (red with white swirls)
* ‘St. Patrick’ (yellow, greenish buds)
* ‘Yves Piaget’ (mauve pink)
