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Plant Life Valerie Easton

Hail to the Hardy

Roses raised with tough love are hardy and lovely, too

IT'S NOT EASY to chuck a bad reputation. Whether starlet or rose, once you're considered trouble, it's hard to shake the perception. But why should Helen Mirren be tarred with the same brush as Lindsay Lohan? As with actresses, some roses are harder working and more reliable than others.

In fact, there's a whole new genre of roses. Whether you call them no-fail, easy-care, modern or "the next generation" doesn't matter. The point is that these new roses have as little in common with traditional, disease-prone, finicky roses as my wheaten terrier has with the cat next door.

You recognize the characteristic blossoms, although many lack the serious ruffles and supreme scent of old roses, or the lanky, aristocratic beauty of hybrid teas. The real change is in the leaves, which stay shiny green and intact, rather than spotted and skeletonized. I think "landscape rose" is the most descriptive of all the marketing monikers, because these new roses are tough plants that solve problems in the garden. For those of you who abandoned roses because of the protective headgear and moon suits you had to don to spray them, it's time to reconsider.

Rose breeders have set new standards in recent years. Bailey Nurseries in St. Paul, Minn., is producing a series called the Easy Elegance Rose Collection. The star breeder, Ping Lim, uses no chemicals in his breeding and evaluation programs. He actually sprays rose seedlings with a mixture of black spot, powdery mildew and disease spores, and if any of it takes, that baby rose is out of there. The result of what Ping Lim calls his tough-love treatment is hardy new roses grown on their own root stock.

William Radler, the hybridizer of tough Knock Out Roses, claims he's "breeding the maintenance out of roses." He's spent years and years, as has Lim, cross-pollinating, testing and eliminating roses. When I hear all this science I'm amazed we're left with roses that are still pretty, let alone fragrant.

Radler collects diseased rose leaves, dries them on newspaper, tosses them in a kitchen blender and grinds them to a powder. Then — get this — when his roses' leaves are susceptibly wet, he sprinkles this fungal-infected powder all over the test gardens. Then he turns on the overhead water to incubate the diseases just a little more thoroughly. As you can imagine, a couple of weeks after such inoculation, many roses are discarded. Only the strong survive, which is just the kind of rose you want to grow in your garden.

Knock Out Roses were introduced in 1998, won an All-American Rose Selection Award in 2000, and are probably the best-selling of the new shrub roses. They come in various shades of pink, but a recent award winner is the yellow Carefree Sunshine. Yellow roses, which I particularly like, are especially susceptible to black spot, but supposedly this one is free from that tendency. I plan to find out this year if that's true, and my less-than-manicured garden will be the test.

What all this means for gardeners, besides we need not feel guilty for loving roses, is that rose ghettos are a thing of the past. Roses used to be grown all together, not because they looked very good that way, but because their special needs required segregation from the rest of the garden. These new, healthier landscape roses are bred to be mixed into borders, massed together or grown in containers. They are ideal plants to cover hillsides, trim walkways or cover the ground in most any difficult spot.

Every rose, no matter how tough, needs help getting off to a good start. Before planting, carefully remove roses from their fiber pots, even if the tag says you don't need to. How would you like to have your limbs restricted in a straightjacket, even a fiber one? Let the roots loose in a nice, wide hole, set the graft just at, or slightly below, ground level. Fill in carefully with compost-rich soil, water thoroughly and keep watering through the dry season. Sniff, enjoy and cut a branch or two for the house, but other than that, leave these gorgeous newbies alone. And that's what's really new about them.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.

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