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nippstress

Are roses your favorite flower - why or why not?

Hi folks

This post stems a little from a tangent in an earlier post, but mostly started from something my 10-year-old daughter said to me recently out in the garden. She's gotten into helping me in the garden and I of course love encouraging that! Earlier this spring, she was picking out tulips and daffodils and lilacs and other spring bloomers to give to the neighbors and bring in the house, when she commented that tulips were her favorite flowers. Then she turned to me and said, "I know what your favorite flower is!" That surprised me, since I wasn't sure about a favorite flower myself. She looked at me with a "duh" expression and said, "Roses!"

Well, you'd think that would be a "duh" given that I have 800 or so roses, and the two rose forums are the only ones I visit regularly on GW. But it really made me pause. Yes, roses are undoubtedly my favorite garden plant, and that's why I have so many of them. But do I really love any given rose flower more than a lilac? A peony? The first daffodil of the season? Those vivid asters and mums at the end of a weary hot summer? The heartstopping blue of monkshoods, or glory of the snow, or forget-me-nots or iris? The fleeting ephemeral excitement of bloodroot or trilliums or dodecatheon or jack-in-the-pulpit or bluebells, appealing precisely because they are here and gone so fast? I was half ready to agree with my daughter when she said tulips were her favorite flower, since when they're blooming they are dearly cherished. I certainly plant enough spring-blooming bulbs each year, and I hesitate to admit that my bulb budget is pretty close to my rose budget most years.

So why do I love roses so much, and don't spend equal time on the bulb forum or the daylily forum or the perennial forum? Of course roses are beautiful and relatively low care and well suited to me and my yard, so that's mostly why I grow them. But I think I get excited about them partly because of the challenge and personality associated with each one. I don't hang out on the daylily forum or cruise the mindboggling diversity of daylily catalogs because daylilies don't present the same kind of challenge for me. Sure, the blooms are lovely and I wouldn't want to be without them, but I really can't take much credit for them. You plant them, pull off the tired leaves and stems and divide them periodically. They don't really need me so I don't spend that much time getting to know them individually. There's not that much to discuss about the care and feeding of bulbs or daylilies, and I haven't found the web postings on those forums to have the interest or attraction for me that the rose forums do, beyond being justly appreciative of the gorgeous blooms posted.

Roses, however - even the easy care ones - are constantly changing and always give me an excuse to be out in the garden. There's pruning season, of course, which is mandatory in cold zones like this one. Then there's the excitement of seeing who has survived the winter, and calling each one by name like Santa - "Now Wilhelm, now Danae, now Prince-r, now Vick's-em (Caprice)...". There's the elbow-jostling and tantalizing teasing to see who'll be first to bloom, and whether new bed-mates will play nicely together. There are blooms that change color and character as soon as you turn your back, and sudden explosions of color that change every day. Even in a no-spray garden, there's always an excuse to be out in the garden pruning out damaged canes or deadheading or shaping to size or staking up floppers or cutting and sharing roses with everyone. There are endless variations on rose care that keep us chiming in here with advice and thriving on the diversity of techniques and opinions expressed. There's the search for the "best" rose for some particular purpose, and genuine differences for what that might be between people or zones and even within particular zones. That kind of work is part of what I consider the fun of roses, but it's also possible to grow roses on a smaller scale in ways that aren't really much work, but still provide changeable personality and expressions.

And oh - the history and characters and quirkiness and connections among the roses and their various parents and breeders. I think there's a reason we refer to our roses by "he" and "she", and not because we have delusions that they really are human. But they do have unique character traits or "personalities" of their own. They allow us all the fun of having a huge family, including needy infants and sulky teenagers that won't listen to what we tell them, without ever having to save up for their college tuition or change diapers. We can mourn them when they die, but if we patronize our small vendors or share with each other when necessary they're also literally replaceable. There's always something to learn, and roses are genuinely fun to read about even if I didn't grow them, because of the wide spectrum of culture and history that they represent.

So roses are my favorite plant by far, and the most fun to talk about, but I'm still undecided about what my favorite flower is among the whole spectrum. Undoubtedly the answer is largely influenced by a lot of the responses when asked about our favorite rose - "whatever's blooming at the time". I wouldn't want to be without lilacs or peonies or trilliums or asters, but I don't want a whole garden full of only them, since there are such large parts of the year when those garden beds wouldn't be doing anything and that would be boring to me. I want something alive and blooming and changing as much as possible throughout the growing season, and as a species the rose has the best capability of doing so for me. With a cottage garden mentality, I'm happy with mixing and matching all of the above and more, so I don't have to pick favorites. However, there will always be roses (and spring bulbs - smile) in every garden bed I plant for the foreseeable future.

How about you? Is the rose your favorite flower? Can you decide?

Cynthia

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