Which roses are best for your S.A. garden?
Have you noticed the Mutabilis roses in bloom this spring? Also called Butterfly roses, Mutabilis is just one of the tough modern and oldfashioned roses. Along with Belinda’s Dream, Carefree Beauty Pink, Martha Gonzales, Mrs. Dudley Cross, Grandma’s Yellow and Lady Bank’s Rose, these roses produce beautiful flowers with minimal care and water, usually over a long bloom season, making them good fits for San Antonio landscapes.
Mutabilis (Butterfly): These roses grow in a clump about 12-feet long, 8-feet wide and 8-feet tall. The flowers are 3 inches in diameter and every plant will have three colors of thin petaled blossoms of peach, pink and red. The plants make quite a show when they are grown as a specimen in full sun on the lawn of a landscape. They also serve well as a hedge planted along a fence or on the landscape border. In addition to being decorative, the plants are dense enough to meet the needs of birds and other wildlife for cover.
Belinda’s Dream: These roses grows to about 6-feet tall and 6-feet in diameter. Its main claim to fame are the very light pink flowers that resemble what you would expect from a classic florist rose bud and bloom. These showy flowers often bloom over an eightmonth period without a demanding pruning agenda or spray program through a San Antonio summer.
Carefree Beauty: This rose produces a darker pink bloom about twice as large as the Belinda’s Dream, but it isn’t a flower that we would expect find in a florist shop. It is formed by a layer of petals that, after their bloom period, form a rose large hip, which works equally well for a gardener’s tea or a redbird cardinal’s
supper.
Martha Gonzales: This rose also has a flat flower, but it is bright red and about a third of the size of the Carefree Beauty Pink. The foliage of the plant has a red tint and the plant only grows to about 4feet tall and equally as wide. As a landscape feature, I like Martha Gonzales best as a traffic director in plantings in between sidewalk lanes. Like most of the other roses in this group, they are drought tolerant and don’t need excessive grooming. Martha Gonzales has enough thorns to direct traffic but does not injure the folks using the sidewalk they are directing.
Mrs. Dudley Cross: This is one rose in the group that does not have thorns. It is an oldfashioned rose that grows a little taller than Belinda’s Dream and Carefree Beauty Pink, but is often planted with them. The peach colored blooms make good cut flowers,
and the plant blooms over a long season of at least six months, like the two pink roses.
Grandma’s Yellow: This rose is popular because of its well-shaped yellow blooms that are produced over a long season, similar to the Belinda’s Dream. Grandma’s Yellow works very well as an easy-tocare-for plant when used in a drift along the landscape edge. The Lady Banks Rose: This rose is blooming right now with yellow or white multi-petaled blooms that are half dollar size. It is the one tough rose in the discussion that does not have a six month or more blooming season. Most of the specimens are thornless and are inclined to grow in a mound shape in full sun. Again, it makes a good cover for wildlife feeding and nesting as a wildlife cover plant. Lady Banks is generally smaller and better shaped than the Mutabilis, except where it decides to grow up through a live oak or mesquite seeking the sun. Unlike the other modern and tough old-fashioned roses in this discussion, it only blooms for three weeks every spring.