Hit the Dirt; Roses

Hi this is Claire Ackroyd and you're listening to. This is one of my favorite times of the year Chris is when all the roses are in bloom. Actually it's usually a month earlier than this but we had such a slow spring that the roses are late and we're still getting the peak rose bloom at the beginning of July instead of the middle of June. In my view a garden really isn't a garden unless it has roses in it that's one of the sort of bits of cultural heritage that I'm saddled with having grown up with a grandfather no great grandfather who cultivated roses and named several of the members of his family and who you know in the English village life is really focused on rose growing. There is a lot of misunderstanding that I'm constantly trying to help people get around about roses and what the different kinds of roses are. So if I can get into five minutes here's a brief sort of classification guide to roses. The hybrid tea's which is what everybody now sees as the classic rose which the long stemmed giant blooms that you buy from florist are fairly recent origin. They were developed from start to the beginning of the

century before they have become the standard by which all other roses are judged which is unfortunate because they are the most difficult to grow the most disease prone and the least Hardy. And there are scads of beautiful roses that are easy to grow and Hardy and provide you with all the thrills of herring real roses with far less of the headaches. The easiest place to start is with the ones that have been in cultivation longest. Roses are what's known as a circum polar genus. They go all the way around the northern hemisphere they are found everywhere in the northern hemisphere. There are thousands of different roses so it's no surprise that there are many many many choices of roses to cultivate. The very oldest roses in cultivation known as the old European roses have been in cultivation as long as civilized as a civilization has existed in the western hemisphere. There are virtually no records of archeological digs that

don't somehow or other include. Reference evidence of Rose cultivation. These are still in cultivation it seems like everybody's grandmother in Maine used to grow these old roses and then the trendy new ones came up. People abandon the old ones and now people are beginning to discover them again. They are by and large they're the group that is known as the Gallic has damask cabbage roses Centifolia Musk roses. They are by and large incredibly fragrant rather messy floppy wide ranging old shrubs very hardy very tolerant of a wide range of conditions and they bloom once they bloom for a long period. Most of them in June and July they have huge multi petal flowers that shatter and drop their petals in a sort of sloppy mess. When they get old and they are to me one of the most delightful and charming group of plants that anybody can cultivate. The thing against them is that they only brew Bloom briefly and I always tell people that you don't reject lilacs because they only brew bloom for

one season and you don't reject for Scythia because it only blooms for one season. So why give up on this delightful group of plants because they only bloom for two or three weeks in the year it. When China was sort of discovered and exploited one of the first things that came back in the tea chests from China were roses that were discovered in China which came back to Europe and were known as the China roses and these were a revolution to the people who grow roses they bloom all summer long. They had long stems and beautiful long pointed buds. And everybody immediately that's where the whole thing panic and craze for the roses started was with the China roses. They were wonderful and beautiful the problem with them was they are disease prone and not hardy at all. They are most of the old China roses are not frost tolerant at all 33 degrees and they're dead. It was by combining those roses with the old fashioned Europeans that the hybrid tea was developed. And

knowing that explains why these hybrid teas are so difficult to cultivate. So now since. The introduction of the hybrid teas and since the cultivation of the old Europeans that have been developed a whole wide range of what can loosely be categorized as hardy shrubs. These have These are not all of the brand new origin. There's a lot of hoo ha are now about a group of roses called the metal and roses there's red Mary Land scarlet Mary Land white Mary Land album any land. These are a group of roses that have been developed in the really in the last decade in France and to my way of thinking these are not the most exciting plants that have ever hit the scene. There have been lovely Hardy roses around for a very long time. Big shrubs small brown covering roses there's a rose called sea foam which has been existence for a while that is long blooming vigorous ground covering fragrant Hardy disease free and I don't know where everybody was when this roses rain around when they all the difference between them the older roses and the

Meadowlands is that the Meadowlands have an enormous publicity machine behind them pushing them on and I was expecting public the rugosa roses to anybody living on the coast here are very familiar this is the so-called beach Rose it is it's a Chinese rose that is naturalized along the coast of America. And the coast of New England and is very hardy free blooming very disease resistant tolerant of all kinds of lousy conditions and it has been used as a parent for producing a wide range of beautiful roses many of them developed in Canada and many of them coming within a group of roses known as the Explorer roses this is a great bunch of roses named after Canadian explorers like William Baffin Henry Hudson John Cabot John Franklin David Thompson there's many more and this is a group of very classy Hardy disease free roses. Most of which have some rugosa in their origins but not necessarily. There are a lot of other roses think of the wild roses that grow in Maine the Virginia rose and the

swamp Rose These have all been used in the production of garden quality shrub roses. And it behooves everybody who loves roses to investigate these things. And start collecting them. This is Claire Ackroyd and I'll see you on here in a week from now.