The return of the rose
The RBG’s rose garden is back, only this time without the chemicals
THE ROYAL BOTANICAL
Gardens has created a brand new rose garden. But even more interesting, it has developed a whole new way to grow the flowers.
On June 23, the RBG will officially unveil a $3million state-of-the-art garden in Hendrie Park that rethinks how roses should be managed and the very purpose of horticultural display in an era of increased environmental awareness.
The original rose garden began in 1967 as a centennial project with the goal of creating a major spectacle of flowering beauty. Genetics were manipulated with hybridized plants that compromised agility for esthetics. And massive amounts of pesticides and fertilizers were used for disease control and life support.
But in 2009, the province banned gardening chemicals. And the RBG’s rose garden — that was a “large monoculture of disease-prone Hybrid tea and Floribunda roses in the shadow of large shade trees” — began to suffer.
Despite major replacements and weekly applications of sulphur and copper sprays, as well as other stilllegal treatments, the rose garden was not nearly the display of its former years.
Then through the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017, RBG horticulturalists went back to the drawing board.
“We said, ‘Let’s do this from scratch and let’s do it right,’” said Alex Henderson, the curator of living collections for the RBG.
Eric Abram, Hendrie Park horticulturalist, said, “We completely removed everything and totally rebuilt the garden from the ground up — actually, we started a couple of feet below the ground by replacing all the soil and building a new irrigation system.”
From there the project would use disease-resistant and cold-hardy roses proven to be sustainable in this area, along with companion plants that would attract insects beneficial to the roses.
The RBG reached out to Peter Kukielski of Portland, Maine — the former curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden and author of the book “Roses Without Chemicals” — to work as a consultant on the project.
The Rockefeller garden had been a test area for many of Kukielski’s ideas.
“Pick the right rose for your garden, plant it properly, and care for it well, and you will be able to enjoy thriving, healthy roses without the need for a HAZMAT suit,” Kukielski wrote in his book.
“Too often in today’s marketplace, roses are hybridized for a narrow, superficial beauty that will attract the consumer in a catalogue, garden centre or florist shop,” he said. “But these hybridized plants can go bad very quickly. Selecting roses because they have good looks may actually be counterproductive. That lovely rose may soon be riddled with leaf spot because the ability to resist disease has been bred out of it.”
In more recent years, rose hybridizers have made major strides in “hybridizing new roses that are disease resistant that don’t really need the chemical sprays,” Kukielski said.
Beyond this, he said, the trick is to find roses that are specifically suited to the climate of the area where they are intended to grow. That’s what the RBG has done with the more than 300 varieties it has chosen. A rose aptly named the Canadian Shield is one.
One key component of Kukielski’s thinking that was not used at the Rockefeller garden was companion plants. The garden in New York wanted to stick to roses. But RBG horticulturalists believed the benefits of adding companion plants far outweighed any concerns about esthetic distraction.
So a major feature of the new RBG rose garden is the addition of plants such as perennials, annuals, dill and coriander, as well as pollinators such as echinacea and milkweed.
Alex Henderson said it will take a couple of years for the rose garden to fully blossom. “We should have a better show next year, and then the following year it should be really established.”
According to Kukielski, “We’ve done everything we could do. We started from the ground up. We had brand new soil. We used the best rose genetics that are out there today. And we companion-planted with plants that are going to bring in all the beneficial insects to provide balance to the bad insects.
“At this point, it’s off to a fantastic start.”
He believes it will be an “incredibly strong garden. And hopefully it will encourage people to do the same thing with their roses at home.”