Rose-growing blooms in Ozarks gardens

This is good news for the Ozarks, one of America’s liveliest gardening regions.

Four winners of two-year trials in 20 test gardens nationwide are among the new roses that are garnering attention and are likely to well in Ozarks gardens. The four, Julia Child, Rainbow Sorbet, Tahitian Sunset and Wild Blue Yonder, are All-America Rose Selections.

The nonprofit AARS ensures that the roses receive the care average gardeners, not experts, would provide and rates them for vigor, flower form, color, fragrance, foliage, disease resistance, and other desirable qualities, based on how well they grow at the test gardens. The Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis is home to one of the 20 test gardens.

The winners assure gardeners beauty and ease of care in average gardening conditions across the nation.

Leading the AARS winners is Julia Child, a rose the late master chef herself chose to carry her name. Child loved the flower’s “buttery color,” anise fragrance, and ultra-glossy leaves, according to AARS. The rose is a floribunda, a type named for producing more abundant flowers. Its blossoms, 3.5 inches wide, combine what AARS terms “old-fashioned style, delicious licorice-spice fragrance, and warm butter-gold color” with bright-green foliage “so glossy it mirrors the blooms.”

Rainbow Sorbet, also a floribunda, has glossy, dark-green foliage and scentless flowers 3.5 inches wide in mixed shades of bright yellow, orange and red with subtle tones of yellow and pink.

Tahitian Sunset is a hybrid tea, the large-flowered rose type most popular with florists and the public. It features dark-green foliage and “apricot buds that turn increasingly pink as they unfurl from a strong yellow base, yielding a subtle blend of colors.” The flowers are 5 inches wide and have a strong anise scent.

Wild Blue Yonder is a grandiflora rose, a type named for its larger flowers. This rose has glossy, deep-green foliage and blooms that are ruffled, wavy and 4.5 inches wide in colors AARS calls “velvety, warm wine purple layered onto rich lavender.” The scent is citrus blossom and rose.

According to local growers, these varieties should fare well in Ozarks gardens. Steve Selph, who raises about 100 roses north of Springfield near Crystal Cave, has grown Julia Child.

“It’s a fantastic rose,” he said. “It’s a true yellow, not a pastel or an orange-yellow. What really surprised me was how many flowers it produced and how the petals stayed for several days, not just two or three.”

Don Bauer grows roses near Halltown for his Bob Town Blossoms business. “I’ve ordered Julia Child and Rainbow Sorbet,” he said. “Things have got to be pretty darned good to start with to win an AARS medal. I think Julia Child will be the winner of the four.”

Beverly Parish of Nixa grows roses that win national awards. “I probably have close to 200 hybrid teas and maybe 250 miniature roses,” she said. “They start blooming in May but are really at their prettiest in September and October.”

Parish won eight awards at the 2005 American Rose Society National Rose Show in Memphis, Tenn. “I’ve read good reports on (the AARS roses),” she said. “I imagine they’ll do well here.”

All three growers also recommend other new roses. “Modern roses have been vastly improved, especially with genetic selection,” said Bauer, who speaks highly of the new Knockout series of shrub roses, which come in red, pink and lighter pink, and are famed already for unique beauty, fragrance and immunity to disease. Particularly, the Knockout series is immune to blackspot, a destructive fungus that thrives in the Ozarks heat and humidity.

“I call it the nongardener’s rose because it’s indestructible,” Bauer said.

Parish likes the fact that Knockout roses provide color all season and “are perfect for people who like roses but don’t want to spend a lot of time spraying.” Selph sees Knockout roses as “the wave of the future.”

All three have tips for growing excellent roses. Parish grows her prize winners in raised beds with compost and Perlite or sand added to keep the soil loose. Bauer advises in planting, “Don’t dig a 50-cent hole. Dig a $5 hole,” that’s sufficient to let early roots spread easily.

Selph offers rural gardeners “the only 100-percent way to keep deer away – hair clippings scattered around the rose beds, along with a few mothballs.”

As for Japanese beetles, which can devastate roses, Parish prefers handpicking. “I go around every morning and knock them into a bucket of soapy water,” she said. Bauer favors systemic insecticides. Selph protects blossoms by covering them with mesh onion bags or similar “breathable” materials.

Bauer, Parish and Selph all credit the new rose varieties for a surge in the flower’s popularity and, best, more confidence for gardeners. The picture is, in a word, rosy.