My earliest recollection of my mother’s rose garden is not a positive one. It was my chore to rake the ground under the hybrid teas in front of our house, and in the tradition of the times, it had to be clean of every leaf and other plant debris. Also, the lines of the tines on the soil had to be pleasingly arranged around the plants. I don’t remember much about the roses — they were sticks coming out of the ground with some red flowers at the top. I was not impressed. My next recollection is of the tension between my mother and my father concerning the bugs and the diseases on the roses. In spite of the bare ground approach my mother was an organic gardener and did not want any poisons in her garden. My father believed in chemical fixes and would sneak out and apply them when he thought he could get away with it. She always found out, and I can still hear my mother doing the dishes very noisily in the kitchen, every clang expressing her frustrations about the rose situation.

It was not a good start for a life with roses — for most of my life I would have said that I don’t like them, and they are too much trouble and get diseases, bugs and what not.

I did like some roses but I did not find them in the garden. From a very young age I would spend my spare time exploring the woods around our village, and I had my favorite rose bush at the edge of the woods. It was a huge wild rose, dense and thorny with little pink single flowers with a golden boss of stamens and a wonderful fresh and sweet scent. I would sit for hours in the wildflowers surrounding it, breathing their scent and watching the finches as they flittered in and out of the rose bush, feeding their young in a nest very well protected behind a wall of thorns. This is one of the happiest memories of my childhood, yet it somehow did not count as an experience with a rose. This was a wild rose, called a Dog Rose to set it apart from the roses that had a recognized value: the Garden Roses.

I stayed true to my love of wild things, went to school to study wild plants and ignored the garden plants. Garden roses I did not just ignore, I had a particular aversion to them, and mercy on the suitor who showed up with a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses.

Time passed, and I realized that my image of roses and gardening in general was a distorted one. Just because I did not care for the traditional manicured garden, it did not mean that I could not have a garden. I could make one with the wild plants that I liked, and in spite of living in the city I could make it a haven for the wildlife that I needed to have around me. And yes, I could also have roses.

By that time I had traveled to botanical gardens that also had rose gardens, and I saw roses there that enchanted me as much as my beloved dog rose. Some were wild roses and some were garden roses, yet both retained the simple beauty and the toughness of their ancestors. I had looked into abandoned gardens and seen roses flourishing despite the lack of care. My image of roses as demanding and disease ridden prima donnas was clearly not accurate.

So I now have what people would call a rose garden, yet I do not give them much care. I do not spray them, and I do not water them beyond two years. A few of them have special places in my heart, despite a little weakness in their constitution. These I spray with dormant oil in the winter and I have a drip on them in the summer. I provide them with good soil and a bit of compost or manure, but I do not otherwise fertilize. I tidy them a bit because I live on a small city lot and have to keep their size down to make space for myself and my other garden projects, but if I did not care about that, I could just let them grow and they would be fine. I love their exuberance and informal growth, how they make hiding places for birds and other creatures and how the bees buzz around the flowers. In addition to the single wild type roses I have also grown to like the old garden roses with their full flowers and intoxicating scents. If well chosen for the area, they are still tough as nails.

People who come to my garden in the spring are often surprised to learn how easy these roses are. The key is “well chosen for your area.” Don’t be seduced by a pretty picture in a book or at the nursery unless the rose is also recommended as disease resistant. Ask nurseries and neighbors for tried and true performers for your area. And importantly, if the rose is not performing well, get rid of it. Why hang on to a rose that does not like your garden if somewhere out there, there is one that will? If it likes your garden, it will show and people will ask you: “What do you do to make that rose look so good?” and you can answer like me: “Not much, it just likes it here!”

I don’t know what my mother would think of my rose garden, but I remember that in her later years the diseased roses were gone, and she planted a Nevada shrub rose in front of the house. In the spring, the huge rose was just covered with creamy semi-double flowers — and she never did a thing to it.
So I think she would have approved.

Anni J

PS. We will be carrying a limited number of roses in the summer, cutting grown from my garden. Also, in the spring issue, I will talk about some of my favorite roses.