When
a friend, a local singer, came with her husband to look at our
collection of roses many years ago, she was disappointed to see almost
exclusively pinks, reds. and whites. "No yellows?" she asked. "No
orange roses, no
apricots?" I looked around, finding none but the red and yellow
'Confetti'(shown below) and a hybrid tea, 'Tropicana', that had held
onto life
precariously thanks to an inundation of soil, straw, and leaves during
the winter, and I was suddenly struck with that lack.
It was not
that there were no roses of these colors on the market at that point
– there
were. It's just that back then, I was taken up with accumulating old
garden roses, species roses, and shrubs – roses that could
take what was then a still windswept and still bare piece of ground
with pretty horrific winters – zone 3
in the barest parts and zone 4 near the house. Plants also suffered
from the terrifically hot, dry, and near-shadeless
summers here. In fact, upon moving onto the twenty
acres that became DragonGoose Farm, I was advised – this was
in the late 1960s, early 1970s – that I
would never be able to grow roses here.
But hadn't the original
builders of our 1875 house planted a red rose on the north side by what
was the front door? And my husband remembered clearly, from when he was
a boy, clumps growing of what he remembers as 'The Yellow Rose of
Texas'
(or 'Harison's Yellow') in
the equally terrifically hot and terrifically cold Grouse Creek in the
extreme northwest corner of Utah.
Having a soft spot for roses, and trying hard to create something of an
oasis here in Lewiston resembling the rampant growth found in my
birthplace in the East, I thought I'd try the hardiest ones I could
find. And most of these very hardy roses were in the pink, red, and
white groups.
Eventually, the many trees and shrubs we'd planted had grown tall
enough and thick enough to create microclimates in which we could plant
roses and other plants that would survive not only in zone 4 anywhere
on the place, but in zone 5 and even in zone 6 – namely
the bourbon rose, 'Madame Isaac Peirere'. Lately, global warming has
added to the microclimate that our trees and shrubs helped create. I
discovered in the newly issued USDA map that our section of v
ery
northern Utah has slid well into Zone 5. So adding sunset colors to our
rose
plant collection became more and more a reality.
Apricot Roses
Just Joey
Besides the 'What a Peach' rose in front of
the barn's porch and shown at the head of this page, we have an apricot
rose, shown to the right – 'Just Joey'.
This is described as an orange blend rose, but here at DragonGoose Farm
it's apricot with a slightly darker apricot at the base of the petals.
This is a hybrid tea (Large-flowered) rose with a strong fragrance. It
blooms periodically throughout the season on a bush that grows here to
a little over two feet.
The
zone recommended for the best growth for this rose is 7 to 10, but we
have no trouble with it here in Zone 5, perhaps because of our
increasingly less severe winters now, and our (now!) abundance of high
shade. This rose was bred in the United
Kingdom in 1972 and derives from the German-bred rose 'Fragrant Cloud'
(1963).
To be safe, and because it's a hybrid tea, we protect 'Joey' during the
winter with a thick stack of mulch as we do all our hybrid teas and
some of our more tender English, Romantica, and Generosa roses.
Tropicana
And now our 'Tropicana', dug up carefully from its spot in a very shady
bed on the east
hill about forty feet from our side deck has been moved to a
sunny
location in a newer rose bed northwest of the
house. It's done very
well there, putting out many flushes of blossoms during the summer (see
photo at left). The blossoms have only a light fragrance but they
look pretty spectacular, glowing like orange-red beacons among their
fellows of
pale yellows and pinks.
'Tropicana' was bred in Germany in 1960 by
Mathias Tantau and introduced in the United States in 1962 by Jackson & Perkins.
This
is another rose
that requires winter protection. It's recommended for Zones 7 and
above but, again, it does exceptionally well here in Zone 5.
Also, though the plant is said to be susceptible to mildew, none has
shown up yet and we've had the rose for something like twenty years.
Confetti
and The Countryman
'Confetti', a floribunda (or
Cluster-flowered) rose is one of the first we planted and that must
have been
twenty-five
years ago. I remember putting the three 'Confetti' in the
ground right after we'd created the horse-shoe-shaped
bed across the oval drive in front of our house. Inevitably, we
lost one of the three to one of our periodic droughts but the other two
bloom in generous flushes throughout the season. The flowers, a red, orange, and yellow blend, are loosely double and have a light tea
rose fragrance. The rose was bred in the United States by Jack E.
Armstrong and introduced by Armstrong in 1980.
Here again is a rose that is recommended for zone six, but this rose
has lived for a long time without struggling too much under our early
zone four conditions. I have looked on the Armstrong
Roses site , but it doesn't list this rose. The site, Helpmefind.com/roses
has a list of suppliers that might have it.
I'm going to insert a pink rose here, fracturing the sunset color
theme, but it's a beauty. 'The Countryman' by David Austin is
still available, though the rose as shown on the Austing site online is
a bit brighter than those growing here which are a soft pink and, like
'Confetti', loosely double. It's one of Austin's English roses,
introduced in 1987, and classified by him as a shrub. It does
beautifully here, standing up under both cold and extreme heat (lost
one of them, too, in the same drought that took a 'Confetti'). It's
slightly behind 'Confetti' in the photo above and can't be seen too
well, but shows up nicely among the white feverfew growing all around
its approximately four-foot canes. Graham Stewart Thomas calls it,"Unassuming
but beautiful." Nice fragrance, too. Sharp and fruity. And it has
two long bloom periods, so the area in that corner is seldom without
color.
Now
that we have a set of sprinklers caring for these two roses, the
remaining plants have
thrived and never fail to bloom in separate flushes during the season.
Buff
Beauty
A long bed on the west of the house is the
home of thirty old garden roses, including Ann Bentall's 'Buff Beauty',
introduced in in England in 1939. This rose is a hybrid musk with some
tender noisette in its parentage which explains its less than vigorous
growth
here in our zone 5 climate. Until a couple of years ago, in fact, the
rose has died down almost to the soil line. (I plant these roses with
the graft buried at least three inches below the soil line, so winter
kill has never been a problem. )
The flowers are deeply fragrant, described as a tea fragrance by some,
has a big flush of bloom in the spring, and another in the fall, with
sporadic blooms in betweeen. It has fat orange hips that hang on well
into
the winter. New foliage is a nice coppery color that matures to a deep
green. It flops a bit and needs staking here, reaching to about five
feet when given support. In fact, it's described as a short climber in
England. It adds
its intense fragrance to that of its fellow old garden roses along this
long, 70 foot bed –
very noticeable in midmorning, especially after a rain or after having
been sprinkled with the irrigation pipes.
Helpmefind.com/roses
lists several nurseries as carrying 'Buff Beauty'.
There are hundreds of roses available in these sunset colors and, in
fact, many of them grow on DragonGoose Farm – the species and
near-species roses, for instance, 'Xanthina', Austrian Copper, and
Harrison's Yellow are scattered throughout the place, and David
Austin's lovely short deep apricot climber 'Abraham Darby' grows on the
edge of our north copse. Austin's creamy yellow 'Jude the Obscure'
grows at
the head of the main driveway. A tall 'Butterfly Wings' grows to above
my head across from our front porch, a single yellow rose with huge
blossoms, and on the other side of this oval bed is another yellow, 'J.
P. McConnell'.
An easy way to chose among these colors – or any color – is to go to
sites like helpmefind.com/roses or rose suppliers themselves and simply
ask for
roses by color. Vintage Roses has roses in categories such as color,
for instance.
More later,
Joan Katherine Shaw
January
2007
Photos
- Joan Katherine Shaw
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