Ruth Stout was an evangelist for the easy way to garden. In the articles she wrote for Organic Gardening from 1953 to 1971, she explained how her year-round mulch system eliminated nearly all the chores that burden gardeners—weeding, feeding, watering, even digging. Most of her writing focused on growing food, but as you'll see in this excerpt from a collection of her articles —The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book— her principles and blunt commonsense applied as well to what are often considered the most demanding plants in the garden, roses.
I suppose it is accurate to say that roses are in a class by themselves in the flower kingdom, although it is certainly true that they are not everybody's favorite. Most of us like them, though; many of us love them, and it seems almost everyone who grows flowers would like to have a rosebush or two.
Then why not? Well, in the past year visitors to our garden almost universally said this about roses: "I love them, but they are so much work and even after I kill myself for them they aren't very satisfactory." Just the other day a visitor said that to me and I pinned her down:
"What makes them so much work? What do you feel you are required to do?"
"The weeding is a never-ending job, but spraying is the worst."
"What is it you spray for?"
"Black leaf spot."
"Does that get rid of it?"
"No, that's the trouble. I still have it."
I had asked dozens of rose growers, some of them excellent gardeners, this question and had always received that answer.
"Then why do you spray?" I asked her.
She looked a little amazed.
"All the books tell you to."
"Yes—but if it doesn't help?"
I told her I never sprayed my roses and that I had some black leaf spot, but no more than any roses I had ever seen which were conscientiously sprayed. I had given up spraying from discouragement and distaste for the job and had continued the practice of no spraying from just every day common sense. If the spraying didn't do what it was supposed to do, what was the purpose of my antics?
The Right Roses
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?
What to Expect from Roses
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.
