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Rosaceous Rosarian Congratulations to our GVRS Rose
Show Winners, 2004!!
Congratulations to our GVRS Rose Show Winners, 2004!! Queen of Show: Oregold/ shown by Judith Curtis-Mardon A huge thank you to Jerry and Carol Macon, who came all the way over from the Eastern Slope, at their own expense, to provide guidance and excellent judging for the show. Jerry was a steadying influence as he advised those prepping their roses, and Carol was both diplomatic and fair as she explained her criteria for judging. As the ARS Southwest Regional Director, Carol has been a terrific influence on all of us, and we'll be seeing more of her when we go to Colorado Springs at the end of the month for the ARS District Conference. Stay tuned for details.
RELAX!! It's Time for the POTLUCK at Wanda and Alex's place! About this time of the year, we're all burned out on organized activities and continuing education. It's time to relax and enjoy the fruits of our labors, don't you think? Let's have a party! How does this sound? Let's hang out in a mosquito-free garden full of zillions of roses, fruit trees, vegetables, and cool spots, while in the company of good friends and great food! Oh yeah--and DOORPRIZES! Doesn't that sound wonderful? This paradise will be available to you on Tuesday, June 22, at 7PM, in Fruita, at 1068 Carolina Avenue. Wanda and Alex will open their garden to all of us, and will provide burgers and fixin's--all you need to bring is something else to eat, and your family. Dress is casual. Ambience will be r e l a x e d. Cameras, water pistols and card games are encouraged. Bring sunblock and hats. To get to the Valencia home, turn north off Hiway 6&50 at 18 Rd/Pine Street (there's a light on the corner, by the High School), and travel north on 18 Rd. until you reach Carolina--turn left onto Carolina. The home will be on your left, about three or four houses west on Carolina. If you get lost, call Wanda at 858-9431 for directions.
Hidden Treasure True to Murphy’s Law - two days after this year’s Rose show was a done deal, I excitedly e-mailed a GVRS friend: “I found a hidden treasure yesterday - - A wire was "growing" out of the middle of the root ball of one of the roses outside my bedroom window. Less than an inch of wire was shooting straight out the middle, not wrapped around the ball. Hanging from it, over half buried in the dirt was ... A TAG! (I just happened to see it as I was contemplating my weeds & how to keep them at bay.) Now I know I own an Apollo, so I have one more I can legally enter in next years Rose Show. Hooray! (I just had to share that good news with someone who would appreciate the thrill of my discovery!)” [Footnote: Since joining GVRS I have learned that an original wired tag left on a rose will over time strangle and deform the plant as it grows, or be engulfed by the plant, making the tag all but impossible to find. For those who don’t yet relate to the significance of tag discovery, you should know that to enter in most categories of a Rose Show, you have to know the correct name of the rose. This can be a source of frustration if you bought, inherited, or otherwise acquired property with a No-Name Garden! However, I am converting my frustration into entertaining curiosity. Recalling impressions left me from the days of Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys, on through The Rockford Files & Columbo and into the current rash of CSI’s, I have decided to become a Rose Sleuth! Care to join me?] by Roberta Forbes
Cutting/Deadheading Crew Needed It's that time again--the roses at the Botanical Garden need some tending. Once a week now, the roses need to be deadheaded, and as blooms become profuse, cutting roses will be available. One of the perks of working in the garden is that there are almost always some roses that can be taken home with the gardeners. We encourage the gift shop to keep cut roses in the store, but with 65 rose bushes, there are a lot of blooms available. If you'd like to spend some time in the garden, please call me and let me know when you can be available. We can team up, or you can work alone if you feel comfortable doing that. 244-2959. Thanks. JC-M
Best Rose Show Hint: Roberta did some research on preservation of cut roses just before the Rose Show, and she found an ARS article with a recipe that she used for her roses. I borrowed some of her mix, and had it in one of my two rose buckets--the other bucket just held water. As it turned out, the Queen of Show rose, Oregold, was one of the roses with Ro's mix, and I must say that bloom perked up a lot before the contest--I think that may be why it looked good enough to win. Who knows? Anyway, I'm a convert! Sugar-Clorox Mix This recipe was part of a longer article about preparing roses for a show, and we'll be turning the whole article into a handout for year-round distribution.
Judith's Corner No, the contest wasn't rigged--the judging was blind. Yes, I won the top prize--the Queen of Show. It was a fluke--a testament to the caprices of Mother Nature, and a quirk in the ARS rules. I'm sure you noticed the fabulous rose bloom we had this year. Established plants, especially roses, really appreciated last winter's steady days and nights of cold--nothing had to break dormancy. As a result, the Spring bloom in the Grand Valley was spectacular, and roses in particular had a sumptuous display. However, they did that display early--in the week before Memorial Day. The Rose Show was the weekend after Memorial Day. Sigh! As the show approached, everyone was whining that most of their roses had faded or disappeared--the second flush was on the way, but not in time for the Rose Show. This was particularly annoying to those of us who made the decision on the 2004 Rose Show date--we'd taken a lot of heat about scheduling the show too early in 2003! This reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker: Mother Nature Bats Last. No kidding. We did have one lucky break. According to ARS guidelines, you can enter roses from any rose garden that you tend, including public gardens like the Hemmerich Memorial Rose Garden at the Botanical Gardens. And, when we did the pruning demonstration there back in April, we pruned those roses really hard. As a result, they bloomed later than the rest of the roses in town. Friday night, before the show, I cut every decent bloom in the garden and took them with me to the Rose Show the next morning. I made them available to anyone who had worked in the garden, and began to groom the remainder for the show. I barely noticed what I was doing--there were lots of things going on, and I was throwing roses into vases as fast as I could. We wanted to have a lot of entries, and good roses had been hard for everyone to find. I trimmed and fluffed and filled out little tags in a frenzy as we tried to get every rose categorized and labeled. Whew! In the meantime, there was a whole other rose show taking shape. We'd
been worried that there wouldn't be enough roses entered to create the sensory
overload we hoped for, so we asked that people bring ALL their roses, including
roses that couldn't be entered. While those of us who had entries were fussing
over our supermodels, Shari and Wanda were arranging all the other roses--and
there were a lot more of those than there were show-roses. Once the judging was
done, these other roses, arranged in vases, were set out for display for Shari Daly-Miller created altar-worthy displays that reminded me of the paintings of Old Masters. Gorgeous. That crazy-wonderful Wanda Valencia not only took the sweepstakes prize for having the most Rose Show entries, she also brought buckets of "other" roses that filled vases all around the room. Turns out she'd gotten up in the middle of the night and had been cutting roses until dawn--of course, she has a LOT of roses, but I don't think any of us expected quite that level of devotion. Wanda and Shari gave us all the sensory overload we could possibly want. Anyway, back at the advertised contest, one of the roses I'd submitted, Oregold, won Queen of Show. Imagine my surprise--I'd spent about 2 minutes prepping that rose. It was pretty, but I didn't think it would stand out. Oregold has been a nice rose in the garden--I'll have to start paying more attention to it when I'm at the Botanical Garden. We can now claim that it's an "award winning" garden. That works. So. You just never know with a Rose Show. Or roses. I had some great roses just days after the show. I didn't get to enter my Gertrude Jeckyl (which is pronounce gee-kel) in the Most Fragrant category, either--maybe next year. What do you think of May 21, 2005, as a possible date? THIS JUST IN: A hail storm on the eastern slope has managed to ruin most of the show quality roses that were expected at rose shows on the next couple of weekends. Anyone traveling to the shows is urged to bring along every rose they can get their hands on!
A Zillion Azaleas and one Rose by Mary Mastin A spring tour of gardens in the South seemed like a great way to break out of the winter doldrums, and it probably would be safe. I was not worried about terrorism or an early West Nile virus outbreak. With soils in the pH range of 3.5-4.5 (much more acidic, and much less alkaline than ours) and cold zones of 7-9, I felt I could enjoy the gardens of South Georgia and Alabama without wanting to bring a few specimens home to see how they would grow in Western Colorado. I was worried about the spring outbreak of “Empress Josephine Syndrome”. Josephine Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon, was smitten with roses to the point that she felt driven to collect one of every rose in cultivation in the early nineteenth century. She came close to her goal thanks to an army of gardeners. The modern victims of this syndrome do not limit their collecting to one botanical family, nor are they at all bothered by the fact that they do not have the personnel available to them that Madame Bonaparte had. Currently, there is no vaccine available for EJS. I suffer from sudden bouts of this syndrome. Fortunately, it is rarely fatal. I spent a few days ambling among the newly emerging azaleas in their dappled shade environment. I was particularly taken with the native species. The native (South East US) blooms are extremely fragrant. What a joy to the senses! Late one afternoon while wandering around an antebellum estate, I was overwhelmed by the incredible display of an ancient wisteria vine climbing up over a twenty-foot-high trellis. The beautiful deep purple flowerets were accompanied by an equally immense vine covered in bright yellow flowers--the yellow Lady Banks Rose --rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’. My husband says it was only the wind, but I distinctly heard a French accented voice whispering “Mary, vous must grow zees rose!” Back home in Colorado, I did the research. Rosa banksiae ’Lutea’ was introduced to cultivation in England in 1824, but as a species rose from China, it has an ancient background. It was named for the wife of Sir Joseph Banks, a great botanical explorer of the era. The rose is described as a thornless, scentless, rambler that is relatively disease resistant and can tolerate a wide range of soil types. The copious small double bright yellow flowers put on a spectacular early spring show. The problems with the plant are twofold. The Lady is not a delicate waif. She is known for her enthusiastic vigor and ability to scramble up and demolish neglected old structures. And, alas, prolonged cold temperatures in the winter are her downfall. I was about to give up the idea of Lady Banks when I read a piece by the noted garden expert Ken Druse, who admitted that rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ was his favorite rose, and that he was successful with it in his garden in Brooklyn, N.Y. (USDA cold zone 6). Grand Junction has been recently upgraded to USDA cold zone 7A. I was willing to forget that -4 degree Fahrenheit recorded on my thermometer last January! It was time to give it a go! When I picked up my Lady Banks seedling at High Country Roses in Utah, Heather Campbell smiled and politely said,” I guess you can grow Lady Banks in Grand Junction.” She didn't sound convinced. I planted baby Lady Banks next to one of my lonely Junipers. All of its neighborly Pinon Pines have succumbed to drought and the Ips beetles, so, hopefully, they will become close friends in the years to come. I will be there with the water and nutrients. It has wind protection and plenty of early and midday sun. In the ground for six weeks, the foliage growth has been rather astounding. It reminds me more of a tomato plant than a rose. Of course, success will be measured by surviving the winter. Look for a picture on the website next spring! [Editor's note: In an odd coincidence, a nursery customer brought in several blooming canes of Lady Banks for display, and everyone who saw it fell in love. The customer has had the rose for several years, and we're talking about using it for propagation. We'll try to get a photo of it for next year. We predict success for Mary's new rose!]
Lessons Learned at the Rose Show. Turns out, it's against ARS rules to charge an entry fee for a Rose Show. We can request donations, but entry fees are frowned on. We decided to charge a fee this year because the facility was so expensive, but another thing we learned this year is that we won't be using that place again, anyway. We were not happy with several aspects of the location--Roberta had to navigate elevation changes using a criminally scary elevator, one of the big sinks we'd counted on had been removed, and, most of all, the public doesn't "get" the location, and can't figure out where to park or how to gain entry. The things we liked about the place were overwhelmed by the deficits. We'll be looking at other locations. Enough of us have been through the show process, now, to have a better grasp of the Big Picture--as usual, we started having rose shows before any of us had seen one. One thing is clear--exhibition quality roses can be planned for, and then cut, in advance of the show. Cutting can begin a week before the contest--there are ways to hold roses that most of us didn't know about until this show. I think we all thought that the roses had to be cut just a few hours before showing. With some foresight, those of us who had gorgeous roses several days before the show could have cut and entered those roses. We could have prepped our roses at home, and made the classification process less chaotic. Every entered rose has to be "officially" identified and tagged, and it turned out to be overwhelming to have everyone needing that done at one time. Nearly everyone made entry or tag errors, which affected outcomes. Ultimately, each named rose is compared only to all other roses of the same name--Oregold doesn't have to compete against Double Delight until the final round of Royal Court selection. That's why classification is so important. We can expand the possibilities for unnamed entries, too, so that some of our most beautiful roses can be awarded, even though ineligible for the Royal Court levels. One of the most interesting lessons learned was the realization that we have far more latitude than we'd realized for defining the parameters of the categories for entry. According to ARS guidelines, what many of us considered "arrangements" are bouquets. So we can have lots more bouquet categories and fewer arrangement categories that seem to defy translating. We can broaden categories to favor characteristics of locally grown roses and talent. And, we can have categories for best child and adult rose-themed attire--we were inspired by Torri Junge's daughter Quinn, who appeared in fill rose attire. Perhaps we can add a child's arranging category, or a child's miniature division. Hmmm. Getting more show entries will be a serious focus for next year, and we've discussed a buddy-system for members who haven't entered before. Everyone who has entered a rose show will be teamed up with a newbie, and coached through the process. We're already talking about next year with great excitement. Stay tuned for more details.
Nursery Notes After working around nursery roses for the last few months, I've noticed some interesting things about bloom color. There's tremendous variation in color and hue depending on age and location. Sunlight can deepen some colors (Betty Boop), and wash the color out of others (Mr. Lincoln). Calling a bloom "red" or "yellow" becomes kind of silly after awhile, as some blooms change colors like we change t-shirts. I do a lot of rose grooming as the roses begin to mature--I cut out weak or dead canes, and try to keep the centers open as they put on greenery. As the roses begin to bloom, I move them out of their greenhouse and into the busy commercial part of the nursery--I try to "get" the customers with a splendid rose bloom display as they approach the front door. We also cut blooms and keep them in vases, so we can show them to customers who ask what certain roses look like. I was particularly amazed by the color range on a couple of Hybrid Teas, Rio Samba and Judy Garland, and a miniature called Rainbow's End. The three are all yellow/orange blends. The buds look like little flames with orange tips, and then open to show a bright display of sunset shades of rich yellows, corals and oranges. If you cut the blooms at this color stage, and take them inside, the orange and coral will gradually fade and the blooms will become a pure yellow. If you leave the blooms on the shrub in the sun, the orange and coral will dominate until the blooms are nearly a fluorescent orange as they fade. Even dry on the cane, they have a stunning color. These are definitely blooms worth drying for their color. I suspect that if these roses were planted in too much shade, you'd see very little of the orange color, and much more yellow. Rio Samba and Rainbow's End hold their blooms for a long time. We carried a new rose called Marilyn Monroe that impressed all of us with the size and excellent shape of the bloom, as well as the bloom's longevity. I guess it's appropriately named. I don't know how it does in the long run, but it performed dramatically better than several veterans. The color, a pale, creamy peach, stayed true regardless of location. Another rose, Medallion, was singularly unimpressive all season long. It was never free of powdery mildew, regardless of treatment, humidity levels, sunlight, or pruning. I don't know anything about Medallion--does anyone have one that has done well? It has an ARS rating of 6.9, and we generally recommend that you buy a rose rated at 7 or above. The ARS ratings, which are available from GVRS or the ARS in the 2004 Handbook For Selecting Roses ($3.50), are not absolutes, but they do make good guidelines to start with. Some low-rated roses will do very well in conditions that favor them, but our climate is a challenge for roses with any signs of weakness. The best example of that is, as I've mentioned before, the beautiful and fragrant Sterling Silver. I'm not saying it's impossible to grow it here, but the odds against survival are high. Sterling Silver was never meant to be a garden rose--it was a florist rose, and its popularity lead to it being sold at nurseries. It's a gorgeous rose, but it will never be known for its stamina or longevity. Dr. Huey usually takes over and you'll find yourself raising a rambling, red rose! JC-M
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