Now a rose by a very special name
A new rose arrived at local nurseries this winter, tucked away amid such seasoned celebrities as “Queen Elizabeth,” “Ingrid Bergman” and “Marilyn Monroe.”
The rose looks like any other bare-root rose in early February: no flowers, no leaves, just a few well-pruned brown canes. Yet in its debut at nurseries from Lakewood to Corona del Mar, it is outselling some of the most distinguished names in the rose trade.
This is the “Mary Lou Heard,” named after the woman who ran a small but legendary Westminster nursery featuring old-fashioned and hard-to-find plants. Heard died of cancer in September at 57. She left behind hundreds of followers who had looked to her to brighten their springs with hollyhocks and ladybird poppies, larkspur and columbine, freesia and her trademark forget-me-nots.
Now, as the soil warms under a spring-like sun, her followers are planting the “Mary Lou Heard” and waiting.
This is a brand-new rose, never before grown in home gardens. No more than 4,000 plants will be sold, only at a few dozen nurseries and only this year. That it exists at all is testimony to Heard’s disproportionate influence in the Southern California gardening world. An informal group of rosarians and other nurserymen managed to find her a new rose variety in time for planting season.
The name of a rose carries with it a certain mystique. Blooms of the famous “Peace” are a pale yellow tinged with a dawn-like pink, well suited to mark the end of World War II, when it was introduced. The red “Mr. Lincoln” is tall and sturdy. “Joseph’s coat” is of many colors -- swirls of pinks and oranges, yellows and reds. Heard’s rose will have burgundy blooms.
Ron Vanderhoff, the nursery manager at Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, has seen roses named for royalty and entertainment stars but not for a local hero.
“I’ve done this for 26 years, and I’ve never come across this. It’s a testimony to what Mary Lou was,” he said.
Heard’s former customers are calling nurseries and suppliers in search of the rose named for her, which sells for about $15.
“They all want a part of her,” said Jayme Cox, who, with her sister Stacy, recently opened a new nursery at the Westminster site.
Planting a bare-root rose is an act of faith. Such scrawny twigs would seem incapable of producing even a few new buds, much less the heavy, fragrant blossoms of spring. Those planting the Heard rose are making an extra leap of faith. Most people have never seen this rose in bloom. Gardeners can only trust, as Heard did, in the power of sun, soil and water.
“You have to learn to trust when you start gardening,” Heard told a Times reporter last summer. “Nowadays, most nurseries do nothing to teach you this. They sell plants in full bloom, which makes for an easy sale, but it means you’re buying the plant at the end of its life cycle. I champion the ugly ducklings of the plant world and simply ask you to take care of them and wait.”
Heard knew about resilience. While hospitalized with depression at age 31, she began working the soil of an abandoned garden. The restoration turned her into a lifetime gardener. She found another snippet of land on an obscure corner close to the San Diego Freeway. She named her oasis Heard’s Country Gardens and ran it for 17 years.
Customers flooded her closing sale. With her permission, they dug up precious plants from the garden and carried them home.
Guests at her memorial service received little packets of forget-me-not seeds.
Plans for the rose drew together experts at some of the region’s most influential gardening businesses. If Heard’s tiny nursery was the industry equivalent of the beloved corner shop selling antique jewelry, Armstrong Garden Centers are the Macy’s stores, and Roger’s is the Cartier of the trade. But when it comes to Mary Lou Heard, the divide disappeared.
No one can say exactly who first suggested a rose as memorial. Susan Kling of What Matters Most, a small Heard-style nursery in Stanton, conferred with Ty Hall of Kellogg Garden Products in Carson.
Hall sent an e-mail to Chris Greenwood, chief rosarian at the Armstrong headquarters in Glendora, who started making telephone calls. At Star Roses, one of the largest and most respected U.S. rose growers, he found the rose.
They knew it was the right one because it was an old-fashioned grandiflora with large blossoms and the stamina to bloom again and again. Its scent is described as slight to moderate “Rose de May,” a classical rose scent.
The lineage can be traced to a famous rose named “Yves Piaget” and to breeders at Meilland International in France. Star Roses annually imports several hundred samples of new rose varieties from France, said Steve Bening, its southwest sales representative. With years of testing, the list is winnowed to six or seven that are introduced for general sale.
Rejected roses are destroyed, a fate that this rose narrowly escaped. Star researchers at the last minute decided not to introduce it, meaning it would have been destroyed had Heard’s friends not come upon it.
“If it had been a real strong scent like ‘Yves Piaget,’ it would have been introduced, and Mary Lou wouldn’t have had a rose,” Bening said.
Most nurseries are contributing some proceeds from the rose to a scholarship fund for horticulture students set up in Heard’s name and administered by the California Assn. of Nurserymen Endowment for Research and Scholarship. Heard’s daughter, Lisa Spruill, said her mother never would have expected such an outpouring of affection.
“I think it would have surprised and overwhelmed her. She had no idea how much she mattered to people,” Spruill said.
At Heard’s former nursery, the Cox sisters have hung a curved sign over the gate with the name Cottage Nursery Gardens. In the unseasonable warmth, some of their “Mary Lou Heard” roses have already begun leafing out.
Elsewhere in the garden, more green shoots emerge from the soil in unexpected spots. At the entrance a knee-high leucojum plant dangles small bell-shaped white flowers. Heard must have planted it long ago.
Tiny nasturtium leaves sprout along the front fence, together with poppies and forget-me-nots. Jayme Cox smiled and shook her head. She didn’t plant them, she said. They’re simply growing back.
