A Love of Growing Roses

New Dawn ~ Large Flowering Climber/Rambler. Introduced in 1930. A sport of Dr. W. Van Fleet. Light Pink. Rated 8.6 out of a possible 10 for garden roses. It is also one of the cleanest roses in this area, getting virtually no disease and not pestered by insects save the Japanese beetle.

This particular photo won a 2nd place award in a national photo contest.

I've always loved roses. I loved getting them from suiters as well as seeing them in the garden. As a child, my mother never grew many. It always seemed that they were nice for a year and then, the next year would come back a different color and shape. She was always told they went wild. What happen, however, is that most roses sold in nurseries and even the box stores are grafted roses. It's cheaper to produce them this way and much, much faster. Because of this, most all roses have a graft at the bottom between the roots and the plant. If this dies, the plant dies, but the roots can live on sending up sprouts of it's own. Hence the "wild" rose. New Dawn, as are most old roses, is easily started with it's own roots; roots to China and is ironclad.

(a borrowed picture from helpmefind.com) Candy Stripe

About 12 years ago, Husband thought it would be a good idea to get involved with a Plant of the Month club and the first thing he bought was a rose bush for me. It was a little rose called Candy Stripe, a sport of the Peace rose and introduced in 1963. The company that was sponsoring this club was a company I no longer deal with because of their reputation. This will explain the next statement of this rose which I new nothing about at the time. This rose is rated 6.1 out of a possible 10 as a garden rose, which is considered way below average for overall strength and disease resistance. This rose has since died for me. On receiving it, I decided I needed more roses to make a rose garden. We went to the local Lowe's garden center and found roses! I got a HT by the name of Rio Samba; an antique rose called Anne Marie de Montravel (which turned out to be an imposter), the Peace rose and another Hybrid Tea called Mister Lincoln. At the same time I also got on line and found a group of rosarians on AOL who gladly helped me with the rose care and I was sunk. Having always liked roses, I now had a passion for them I'd never known before. I found the different classes of roses, the history and being able to grow them to be fasinating. I also had the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting and wonderful characters ever. For me, it's a journey well worth traveling and the journey is far from over. Who knows where I'll go from here. I have yet to exibit, though I do the photography. We'll see.