June is rose month, peak time for these popular beauties. To celebrate I took an out-of-town friend to Morris Arboretum over the weekend to see its amazing Rose Garden. My friend grew up in Dallas and besides her memories of fragrant eucalyptus, it's yellow roses that are imprinted on her brain.
The garden was in full bloom, its four formal quadrants bursting with color, scent and what Stephen Scanniello, the rose expert I met last week, calls "a Monet-like quality." This impressionistic, dreamy kind of landscape results from the beautiful roses, of course, but also the plantings that surround them. So we didn't just see climbers and ramblers and hybrid teas of every shade and size, we saw catmint and foxglove, clematis and smokebush, growing around, next to and through the roses.
My rose story will be in the paper this Friday. I hope you'll tune in. (To read the story, go to http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/virginia_smith/20070608_The_permissive_gardener.html. To watch the video, go to
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/7903916.html)
Stephen is quite a character, as well as being a prominent rose expert, and he has more than 200 fabulous roses in his garden. Many are the old garden variety, romantic antiques that are loaded with fragrance.
He's a big believer in "companion planting," plants that play off the roses in ways you can't imagine - pinks next to lavenders next to oranges next to whites, each combination as interesting and pretty as the next. This is exactly what Morris' Rose Garden is all about, and it gave me ideas.
It also made me wish I had more room at home - or more room in a sunny location - to plant roses. I have about a half-dozen scattered about my garden, all planted in the last year, and it was quite a thrill to see the first blossoms last week. I have several of them planted by the front fence in hopes that they'll cimb and tumble over and give passers by a memorable experience. (Perhaps my roses will make a lasting sensory impression on one of the neighborhood children!)
Still, the roses at Stephen's house and at Morris are something to see in their own right. There is more variety among roses than you might think, given that all of us carry around memories of very particular ones from our childhood. Stephen often talks about "the pink monster" that his mother grew in front of their house.
Red roses are most people's favorite. But the classic 'Peace' rose is the one I recall best. Stephen says it's an example of a "great rose that had a great name." Bad names can torpedo great roses, he says, just as a great name can elevate a bad rose to popularity. 'Peace' was a rarity, a truly fine rose with a powerfully good name.
My friend lives in an apartment and works too much, so she hasn't got a garden to putter around in. At least, not yet. But she loved the roses at the arboretum. They got her talking about the role roses played in her childhood, too, and how, when her mother died many years ago, the florist suggested different flowers for the funeral ...
My friend wanted only one - of course, you know: yellow roses.
To read the rose story, go to: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/virginia_smith/20070608_The_permissive_gardener.html
Comments (1)
Virginia hello
As I am surely one on the laziest gardeners around, my tactic with roses to avoid spraying and looking at japanese beetle damage-is I have only roses that bloom once and are done. Climbing about on our fence and into a few tall shrubs, to high for Deer snacking, are American Pillar, New Dawn, -yes it repeats, but not that one would notice, a small flowering pink that I grew from a cutting from the Barnes, which Peter collected along the Paoli's tracks, a single red that does not do very well. I recommend American Pillar an dNew Dawn, if you want rambunctious roses too pretty to hold back.
jane
Posted by jane golas | June 6, 2007 10:44 AM
Posted on June 6, 2007 10:44