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Dr. Leda's Rose Journal |
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An Apple for the Enablers: Dr. Leda Salutes Her Favorite Rose Gurus
By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.
September 1, 2002
I've often thought the best teacher isn't the one who teaches a child how to read, but the one who helps the child learn to love reading. The same is true of rose mentors. So here's a back-to-school tip of the tiara to five very special rose teachers: the ones who taught me that knowing how to enjoy roses is far more important than just knowing how to grow them.
Nancy: I wasn't always a stellar pupil. Just ask Nancy, the neighbor who gave me my very first rose. The day my oldest son Harrison was born, she brought me a cutting of 'Harison's Yellow,' thought by many to be "The Yellow Rose of Texas." It was blooming its head off, as it would every April on my son's birthday. I didn't want to come right out and question my neighbor's integrity, but I harbored serious doubts that this thing was in fact a rose. The tiny yellow semi-double blossoms bore no resemblance to the long-stemmed red roses I knew from Valentine's Day.
My suspicions about poor Nancy's credibility were confirmed two years later when my second son was born. He was a feisty redhead named Finnegan, so this time she brought the single salmon-orange Hybrid Tea rose 'Irish Fireflame.' "Ah-ha," I said to myself. "Definitely not a rose. This woman is clueless. The thing only has five petals! Must be some kind of daisy."
I probably wouldn't have flunked rose kindergarten if I'd named my children Mister Lincoln and Chrysler Imperial. But Nancy, bless her heart, got me off to an invincible start with two tough, easy, traffic-stoppingly beautiful roses.
Murray: The two roses flourished, and I received so many compliments on my lovely front yard, I decided to go back to school and study landscape architecture. I took a part-time job at a nursery where one of my co-workers was a mysterious, soft-spoken man named Murray.
Murray was in charge of the roses, and also the hot topic for lunch-time gossip among the female employees. He had once been a sculptor, or maybe a poet, they murmured; he always dressed in the exact shade of black that matched his gorgeous eyelashes. "I hear he flies to Paris every month to have his hair cut," said one woman. "No, he has it done in Milan," insisted another. "I think he cuts it himself, with Felcos," maintained a third. All three seemed equally plausible.
One day I mentioned that I might have some roses at home, and when I told him their names, Murray was impressed. Apparently owning such unusual specimens marked me as a distinguished rose connoisseur, and next thing I knew, I was promoted to Assistant Rosarian.
Murray's passion for roses was contagious. I followed him around like a puppy dog, absorbing a wealth of information. He was particularly enamored of old garden roses, and (when I could take my eyes off the wild spectacle of his hair) I learned to adore their subtle colors and elegant grace. Within a year my front yard overflowed with romantically fragrant antique roses, and I was cutting my own hair with Felcos.
Chip: I soon discovered that my true calling was horticulture rather than design, and I found a full-time job at a larger nursery. The Rose King there was a droll and wickedly funny genius named Chip. Chip was crazy about hot colors. He had an bold eye for the bubblegum pink of Barbie's Corvette, the tropical neon-orange of a vintage Lilly Pulitzer, the lurid cerise red of a truckstop barmaid's toenail polish--and he preferred them all in one brilliantly self-clashing flower.
Coming from the Murray School of Tasteful Pastels, I was horrified. I felt queasy whenever I looked at the hot orange 'Playboy' and the hot pink 'Playgirl' displayed side by side. I begged Tom Carruth to introduce a neutral-colored floribunda and name it 'Play Dough' so the two could be alphabetically separated.
But I was young and impressionable, and it wasn't long before my inhibitions fell by the wayside. Chip's whimsical nonchalance and daring creativity were a corrupting influence; he gave me permission to clash and have fun. Soon my back yard looked like the bargain basement at the Happy Hooker Muu-Muu Emporium; it made Carmen Miranda look like a Quaker.
I was more than halfway down the road to ruin.
Mrs. Washington: I met Mrs. Washington a few years later, when my car was in the shop for a month and I had to walk to work. Every morning when I passed her house, she would be out front in a housecoat and slippers, leaning on her walker, slowly struggling down the steps. Sometimes she had an oxygen tank in tow. She paused to rest on each step, and we would always exchange a pleasant greeting.
One morning I went to work a half hour late, and lo and behold, in those 30 minutes, Mrs. Washington had navigated all five steps and was inching steadily along her walkway. "I'm in a big hurry," she told me. "I want to get there while the dew's still wet."
I saw that her destination was a rose bush out by the street. It was a scraggly old thing, just a common red Hybrid Tea with more than its share of blackspot, leggy in a way that meant it hadn't been pruned in years, but it was covered with blooms. "I smell my roses every morning," she told me. "That's what makes the rest of the day worth while." At the rate she was going, it would take Mrs. Washington another fifteen minutes to reach the bush.
It's people like this who belong in the Rose Lovers Hall of Fame.
Calvin: Calvin, the great Maestro of exuberance and joie de vivre, was perhaps my favorite rose guru of them all. When I first met him, he had just turned five. Like another great Calvin, he loved clothes and had a flair for creating original outfits. His favorite ensemble was a pair of red corduroy trousers with a dinosaur print, tucked into the tops of a pair of mismatched cowboy boots, one black, one brown, often two left boots.
By then, I was the head rosarian, and I was having a stressful day at the nursery. I had 5,000 potted roses just coming into bloom, and I was overwhelmed with aphids, powdery mildew, a short staff, weather woes, special orders, watering schedules, ringing phones, fussy customers...the usual.
I was down in the rose area, trying to take inventory in the midst of a thousand interruptions, when suddenly I heard a high piercing shriek that sounded like a banshee on methamphetamines. I looked up and there was Calvin, barreling down the hill like a jackrabbit. When he came to me and my clipboard, he stopped, flung out his arms, and bellowed at the top of his lungs: "Roses! Roses! There's nothing in the whole wide world but ROSES!" Then he tore off to explore the conifer section.
And that has been my mantra ever since.
