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If you are ambitious enough to read books and articles on roses you will be told over and over that they need a great deal of water. Last fall, after the floods and downpours here in Connecticut, our roses bloomed as never before. Even better than in spring. Peace had fifteen large and lovely blossoms at one time; Radiance had forty. All the roses kept it up until after several light frosts. If I had doubted it before, I knew then that roses like lots of water.
But this is a discouraging thing for many of us. In a dry season everything needs watering but if you have a dug well which may go dry, as many of us have, you can't spare water for your roses. Mulching, of course, is particularly valuable in a dry season, if you are short of water. And yet even watering them plentifully apparently doesn't give you the "ever blooming" ones.
What is the answer for us who like roses and would like to grow some? As far as the work is concerned, I mulch them and never have to bother with weeds. I let the rotting hay nourish them and don't have to fool around with manure or fertilizer. I eliminate spraying, since it doesn't get me anywhere. When the professors of agriculture visited my garden one of them said that it was definitely true that healthy plants are less likely to be attacked by bugs than unhealthy ones. Perhaps the kind of food I give my roses keeps them healthy.
Another thing: I have learned to be realistic. I have stopped expecting more from roses than I am likely to get. Just because people who sell roses enjoy calling them "ever blooming," does that mean I am obliged to believe them?
We don't expect peonies or lilacs to bloom straight through to frost and we are not likely to expect them to until someone gets the bright idea to advertise them as ever blooming. Then what a dither we'll be in, feeling as frustrated over lilacs as we now are over roses!
I am happy and satisfied with many lovely roses in June, a spattering through the summer, and a few to pick after some light frosts. The bushes begin to look a bit rocky, it is true, how do most flowers (and most people, for that matter) look toward the end of their natural lives?
Is it the fault of the roses that we want more from them than they have to give? Someone said to me, "I like iris, because when they're through they're through. They don't try to kid you."
True enough—and roses don't try to kid us either. But we do seem to be bent on kidding ourselves.
