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I have one climbing rose, New Dawn, one Rose Hugonis, and 12 hybrid teas. Three of these, a Peace, a Radiance, and a lovely one my mother planted more than 25 years ago whose name I don't know, are at the three corners of the portulaca bed. The others are along the driveway, with three holly bushes in line with them and the Rose Hugonis at one end. The New Dawn is against the house.
I never spray any of these, never weed or fertilize them. They are very, very little work. In the autumn I cover the entire row with five or six inches of hay and leaves. In November I take dirt from between the rows of asparagus and heap some around each hybrid tea rose bush.
This dirt is extremely rich. It is actually compost, for it is simply rotted mulch. I could take it from any place in the vegetable garden, because the entire garden, with its year-round mulch of hay and leaves, is rich compost. But there, between the asparagus rows, this excellent dirt is not needed, and there will always be more.
In the spring this earth which has been heaped up around the roses is judiciously pulled back thinly over the deep mulch. This is the easiest way to dispose of it and also it makes the row of roses look as neat as if there was nothing there but dirt.
If there isn't quite enough earth to cover the hay adequately, all I have to do is bring a few wheelbarrow loads of partly rotted mulch from the garden. Now I have an adequately mulched bed of roses, whose appearance deflates the most critical garden club visitor who has come to have a look and ask me to talk to her club, providing my flower beds don't look too awful.
This mulch keeps down weeds, conserves moisture, rots and feeds the roses. The dirt spread thinly on top of it, even if full of weed seeds, will not give me any bothersome weeds, because the tiny ones which start send their roots into hay full of air pockets, and make no headway. They will certainly never rob the roses of any nourishment, but they aren't pretty and so, two or three times a summer, I either pull them out or toss a little rotted mulch on them. This probably takes about three hours a season.
I've seen sub-zero roses advertised during the past few years. These are supposed to be immune from winter killing, which doesn't particularly interest me for we always have some sub-zero weather and yet I have lost only one rose—Gray Pearl. More important to me, some sub-zero roses are said to be almost immune to black leaf spot. I have three of them, but we haven't had them long enough to know whether this is a fairy tale or not.
New Dawn, Rose Hugonis and Radiance have almost no black leaf spot. I planted my Rose Hugonis—a shrub rose—two years ago and I wish you could have seen it this spring and wish I had taken a picture of it. It is a beautiful, surprisingly large bush and hundreds—maybe a thousand or so—dainty, single, yellow blossoms. In these two years it has made three new bushes which I have dug up and given away.
Radiance, a hybrid tea, is a marvelously cooperative rose. It has more blossoms, and blooms more continuously, than any variety I am familiar with. It is not sensationally beautiful—just a pretty, friendly pink rose.
Now, do my bushes have a beautiful supply of roses all summer and fall? No. Do anybody's? I don't think so.
It seems to me that our attitude to hybrid tea roses is too much like our attitude to our friends: we are likely to expect too much of them. If we like half-a-dozen things about a person, why do we feel that he should have a dozen, or even eight, things for us to like? If he is a pleasant addition to a dinner party why must he also be the kind of person who arrives on time?
And so with roses. Just because the people who sell them like to say they are ever-blooming, do we have to expect it of them? Because people sell sprays to do away with black leaf spot, do we have to keep on using it when we find that it doesn't do away with it?
