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Dr. Leda's Rose Journal |
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Confessions of a Compulsive Deadheader: Part I
Dr. Leda spends her summer vacation illegally grooming other people's roses....
By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.
July, 2004
So, my youngest son just graduated from Harvard. I know, that doesn't seem to have much to do with roses, but humor me: I've waited a long, long time to type that sentence. Simultaneously, my eldest son returned from a year in London, and for the first time in several years, both my boys were in the San Francisco Bay Area at the same time.
"Hold still," I told them. "Stay put, don't move. I'll be right there." So I bid a temporary farewell to my sweltering home in Deep Inferno, Louisiana, and flew straight into the luxurious cool thick bank of delicious summer fog at SFO. Oh, the things a mother will do for her offspring!
It turned out Harvard Boy had deftly wielded his hot new diploma to land himself a plum job housesitting in the Oakland hills for a friend of a friend who was spending the summer in Europe, and he graciously invited me to stay in his spare bedroom. The house is in a quiet, charming neighborhood where the front yards, microscopic by rural south Louisiana standards, are a cheerful crazy-quilt explosion of festive cottage-garden color. Not a single square inch anywhere is wasted on boring lawn, junipers, or lava rock.
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| Unsightly floozies cry out to be groomed. |
Every morning, while H-Boy zonked and snored his way through a lingering post-graduate pre-career coma, I woke up early, brewed myself a pot of Peet's most decadent gourmet caffeine, and headed out to explore the winding hilly streets and gawk at the astonishing abundance of flora in bloom.
Tell me, since when did Oakland become the Rose Capital of the Universe? I was absolutely astounded at the number of yards that had roses in bloom, every kind and color imaginable. There were roses climbing on fences and trellises, roses in pots on porches, roses grown as hedges; promiscuous Hybrid Teas flashing their huge exhibition-quality blossoms, while unruly antique roses gleefully tangled themselves around everything in sight. Even the humblest abode with no more than a postage-stamp sized parking strip somehow managed to squeeze in more roses than Kew Gardens.
And naturally, this being summer, all those millions of roses desperately needed deadheading.
Now, for you confused rose novices in the audience, let me pause for a moment to explain. The term "deadheading" does NOT mean we drape the roses in tie-dye and Birkenstocks, douse them with too much patchouli oil, and load them into an ancient VW microbus for the proverbial Long Strange Trip.
Deadheading simply means that we remove the dead, spent flowers from the plant, which we do for several reasons.
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| A healthy Rugosa rose with excellent remontance. |
First, the spent flowers tend to be unsightly. A few roses are "self-cleaning," meaning they drop their petals tidily and voluntarily as soon as the color starts to fade. But most roses cling desperately to their unattractive brown, withered, bleached-out, has-been petals long after the party's over, contributing to the unfortunate look of a Christmas tree decorated with used Kleenexes.
Second, when spent flowers and the resulting hips are allowed to remain, many roses will stop producing new blossoms. Instead, they divert their energy into the production of seeds, thereby reducing the coveted quality we call "remontance," or repeat bloom. This is not desirable, and we refer to such roses as "floozies" who are "past their prime" and have "let themselves go." Every time we remove a spent flower or hip, we're informing the deadbeat floozy that it's time to quit slacking and make another flower on that stem.
Third, many of us find the act of deadheading itself to be extremely satisfying. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's a genetic holdover from the days when our ancestors' survival depended on squatting on their haunches in caves, picking unsightly nits and ticks and grubs from the shaggy manes of their hairy-backed mates. My own Neanderthal forbearers must have been particularly hirsute and infested, as I seem to have been blessed with a double dominant dose of the compulsive grooming gene. My nitpicking fingers itched at the mere sight of those slovenly Oakland floozies.
Now even if you don't know much about roses, even if you aren't sure you would recognize a rose if you saw one, even if you just landed on Earth from a distant unnamed planet that has no water, oxygen or sunlight, you've probably heard that you're always supposed to cut the rose stem back to the next leaf with five leaflets. This seems to be the number one factoid about roses that every man, woman, child, and Labrador Retriever has memorized.
I am so sorry to be the one to shatter your universe, but in fact, this thing about cutting back to the next group of five leaflets isn't necessarily true. Well, ok, maybe it's true sometimes, the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day. But if it isn't a hard and fast rule, you may be wondering, then why do all the books say to do it? My theory is that it's probably because the actual truth is too terrifying to print. The kind authors and prudent editors are afraid it might scare you away from rose gardening (and thus purchasing rose books) forever.
I, however, am convinced that your serious rose addiction is going to be a heck of a lot harder to cure than that.
So are you ready? Are you sitting down? The actual truth is this: Each individual rose has a different location on the stem that is the optimal site (often referred to as the "good spot", or G-spot for short) for deadheading. Even worse, every single stem on any given bush has its own "good spot," and they might all be different. Sometimes it might be less than an inch below the blossom; other times it might be four inches, or at the next five leaflets, or even down at the fifth set of leaflets. And it's entirely up to you to figure this out.
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| The simple technique of bare-handed snapping. |
Now don't panic. There are several very easy tricks for locating a rose's G-spot, and we're going to learn those next month. (We're also going to learn that it's not a life-or-death matter if you miss the spot by a mile--another secret truth that doesn't exactly promote the sale of esoteric how-to manuals.) But first there's one more deadheading myth I need to explode.
Many of us were raised on the conventional wisdom that we're always supposed to cut the stem at a nice clean proper 45-degree angle. But recent studies have shown that many roses perform just as well or better with a quick, easy, happy-go-lucky method called "snapping," which doesn't involve clippers (a great boon to compulsive groomers traveling in these days of heightened airline security). This technique entails using the thumb and forefinger to snap the spent flower, with a simple flick of the wrist, so that it pops off right below the hips. Snapping has its pros and cons and variations, which we will plumb to greater depths next month in Part II.
Meanwhile, I would like to offer a sincere apology to the fine rose gardeners of east Oakland. No, it wasn't renegade deer that wandered into your front yard early one recent morning and quietly nipped the hips off your roses. It was probably just an obsessive Cro-Magnon hairdresser with poor boundary issues. Thank you for not shooting trespassers on sight. Your gardens are truly magnificent!
Next month Dr. Leda will explain the proper way to pinch a floozy's G-spot.
