Miniature roses
25 years after she planted her first miniature potted rose, Lynda Hallinan again finds herself attracted – and addicted – to these small but perfectly formed bloomers.
Lynda Hallinan finds much to love about these tiny floral delights.
My post-lockdown love affair with miniature roses started with a kiss – or at least a socially distanced ‘Loving Touch’ (a wee apricot variety) – and before I knew it, I’d amassed 50 of these petite performers.
The American novelist Gertrude Stein once joked that “whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping”. Certainly, if the coronavirus pandemic has proved anything about my own purchasing habits, it’s that plant shopping makes me happy.
Cast your mind back to the day before the Level Four lockdown last March, when garden centres were cleaned out of everything from seeds to trees. A few weeks later, keen gardeners emerged from their bubbles with tidier backyards and a desperate desire to buy plants. All plants.
Unfortunately, there weren’t that many plants to be had, as lockdown restrictions had put the kybosh on commercial nursery propagation work, resulting in a shortage of potted colour and seedlings in punnets. At my local garden centre, the staff hastily rearranged the aisles so that where I would usually find bedding six-packs, I came across an entire shelf of Patio Petite miniature roses grown by Evandale Nurseries in Southland.
Minutes later, I was at the checkout clutching seven miniature roses, in pink (‘Lucky You’) apricot (‘Loving Touch’), deep red (‘Jessie McKenzie’), lilac-purple (‘Lavender Jewel’) and bold gold (‘Shakespeare Festival’), plus a pair of novelty two-toned beauties in ‘Magic Carrousel’ and ‘Exotic Treat’.
Weirdly, up until that moment, I hadn’t given miniature roses a thought in years. Decades, even.
As a teenager, my boyfriend once gave me a potted miniature standard rose as a Christmas gift. It had bright yellow buds that opened to creamylemon and I adored it, lugging its terracotta pot around a series of student hovels and rented flats before bedding it into my parents’ country garden upon graduation. A couple of years later, while pruning a hedge of Mexican orange blossom with his petrol-powered trimmer, my father accidentally overshot the end of the hedge and lopped the head right off my beloved miniature rose.
I’m now making up for lost time. Over the past few months I’ve been not-so-quietly collecting more minis, photographing their flowers in a little bud vase that potter Fiona Henderson made from clay dug out of my garden. (And I say not-so-quietly because I’ve been loudly extolling the virtues of these little charmers to my friends.)
Whereas last summer I grew garlic and sunflowers in neighbouring beds in my equestrian arena garden, this year I’ve tucked in several dozen mini roses with low-growing annuals and perennials – lobelia, omphaloides, calibrachoas, daisies and bedding verbenas – at their feet. Those teeny flowers have proven to be a huge source of pleasure, as each bud opens to reveal flat-faced or many-petalled flowers, some with a striking central boss of golden stamens. Their colours range from white (‘Snow Twinkle’) to almost black (‘Black Jade’) with every shade of pink, yellow, red and orange in between, plus unusual hues of lilac (‘Silver’) and purple (‘Orchid Lace’).
All are just delightful. I’ve taken to displaying little bunches of them in tiny jugs and shot glasses all around our house, from the toilet cistern to the kitchen windowsill and my desk.
I may have temporarily forgotten about miniature roses but when I shared my newfound fascination with them on Facebook, Canterbury rosarian, miniature rose breeder and former specialist nurserywoman Dawn Eagle promptly got in touch. In 1985, Dawn and her late husband Barry wrote the book (several books, in fact) on the subject. Miniature Roses
(Collins Publishers) included photos of all the popular varieties of the day, many of which are still available.
Dawn and Barry’s motivation to grow miniature roses was originally quite practical. “They didn’t take up much room so when we bought our first house we could fit far more into the garden. And later, when we started exhibiting roses we could carefully layer 80-90 miniatures between wet paper towels inside a shoebox to fly to Auckland, whereas you might only fit three or four large rose flowers in the same box.”
Dawn and Barry attended their first rose show in 1965, when “all the miniatures were little flat pink things that had been bred from Rosa
chinensis minima ‘Rouletii’. It was pretty uninspiring and most of its progeny were very similar. Then the American rose breeder Ralph Moore crossed ‘Rouletii’ with a floribunda and ended up producing miniature roses with a more recognisable flower shape, such as ‘Golden Angel’ and ‘Beauty Secret’.”
The Eagles started importing these new varieties to exhibit. “Then of course everyone saw them and wanted them, so I used to save small yoghurt pots to put cuttings in to share around. But soon it was costing us a fortune in yoghurt and potting mix, so I decided to sell a few.”
No one in New Zealand specialised in miniature roses at the time and Dawn admits that Barry, a high school mathematics head, wasn’t too keen either. “He said, ‘I haven’t got time’ but I said ‘well, I do’ as our three children were almost grown by then. So Barry borrowed an electric
Miniature roses are perfectly proportioned for petite posies, tussie mussies and hand-tied bouquets.
typewriter from school and I typed up 50 catalogues to slip under everyone’s hotel room doors at the National Spring Rose Convention.”
As word spread, Southern Cross Nursery flourished. As well as sowing seed to breed her own varieties, Dawn took up to 100,000 cuttings each spring (her arthritic hands have paid the price for all that repetitive work). From experience she says the crucial factor in propagating roses from cuttings is to ensure the parent plant is well-watered during the 24 hours prior to snipping. “Never take cuttings from a dry plant.”
When the nursery outgrew their quarter-acre backyard in Spreydon, they upsized to a bigger section at Halswell, then moved to five acres in Prebbleton, where Dawn still lives.
“We had the nursery going for 24 years but only made a good profit in two of those years. People would say ‘they’re not real roses because they are so small’ but it costs nearly as much to produce a good miniature plant as a standard size rose and we were wholesaling them to garden centres for $2 each back then.”
In the 1980s, Dawn and Barry had close to 1000 rose bushes in their garden, evenly split between minis and full-sized bloomers. At 83, she still has 150-200 garden roses but she’s culled her mini collection down to “just the ones I like”. Half are in beds with another two dozen or so potted up in 40-litre containers.
There’s pale pink ‘Irresistible’ (for winning awards) and ‘Extra Special’, which has creamy petals that open with a pink edge that deepens to red as the flower ages. “Every time I stop and look it at, I think it’s just lovely.”
Dawn’s longtime favourites include pale cream ‘Moonlight Lady’, which she bred and named after the 1984 song by Julio Iglesias. “When he toured New Zealand years later, we got in touch with his PR people and were given tickets to his concert!”
“‘Moonlight Lady’ was an almost perfect hybrid tea-shaped rose but it
The small-flowered pink rose ‘The Fairy’ isn’t technically a miniature, says Dawn. It’s actually classified as a dwarf shrub or polyantha rose.
was very thorny, as it was bred from ‘Pink Petticoat’ and she was inclined to pass on her prickliness."
In Pukekohe, cut-flower growers Blooming Hill Roses supply several spray-type miniature roses to florists. Some varieties are noticeably more fragrant – and pricklier – than others, giving rise to the theory that scent and thorns are genetically linked so you can’t have one without the other. Legendary rose breeder Sam McGredy also told Dawn that the gene that gives roses their fragrance also gives them “a propensity to mildew”.
Sam McGredy introduced several vibrant miniatures, including a series named after local places like ‘Wanaka’, ‘Kaikoura’ and ‘Otago’.
I’ve long had a weakness for roses in unusual colours, including violet ‘Ebb Tide’ and ‘Midnight Blue’, and now their mini lookalike ‘Blue Peter’. However, as is often the way with roses that stretch the rainbow, “the only good thing about it is the colour,” says Dawn. She’s right: the buds promise so much but the sparse petals open rapidly to a fully flat bloom that barely lasts a day.
Conversely, “the more petals there are, the longer the buds take to open. But some don’t open properly at all so they get botrytris as the summer dew settles and they start to rot.”
Over the years, Dawn and Barry made friends with miniature rose lovers around the world, including Ralph Moore, who worked in his Californian rose nursery until he was 104. “One time I asked Ralph for his definition of a miniature rose. He said ‘a miniature has a small flower, a fine stem, small leaves and, most importantly, a smaller internode (the length of stem between each node), so everything is in proportion’.”
Miniature roses are divided into the same rose categories as standard varieties – hybrid tea types, climbers, floribundas, pillar roses and so on – but they are often marketed in different ways. In the United States, the larger minis are categorised as
mini-flora, with flowers that reach almost the same size as a standard floribunda but are single to a stem.
“When we were breeding roses for sale, we introduced the term ‘patio’ to sell roses that were slightly bigger than standard miniatures. If I’m honest, we did that purely so we could get another dollar per plant,” Dawn confesses with a chuckle.
Patio types are very popular for gardeners with limited space to grow roses, as are the compact varieties sold by Waikato nursery Amoré Roses. They brand their Bambina or Piccolo roses as either Faeries (which includes miniatures, patios and mini-floras) or Pixys (true minis).
Dawn isn’t personally a fan of grafted miniature roses, as the vigour they get from their sturdy rootstocks “takes away their petiteness”, but if you only have room for a few pots in a courtyard, then they give you more bang for your buck. When I bought a grafted ‘Taffeta’ (the fourth most popular small-flowering climber in the 2021 NZ Rose Review’s list) from Matthews Roses, it came out of the mail order box with more than 160 buttercream blooms on it!
Miniature roses require the same care – watering, mulching, feeding and spraying (for perfectionists) – as other roses. However, cutting-grown miniatures are shallow-rooted so need
Pick miniatures in bud and the blooms will happily last 7-10 days in a small vase. The bedding verbena tucked into this posy basket is ‘Peaches and Cream’.
more consistency when it comes to summer irrigation. Allow room to grow (at least 50cm, or twice that if grafted) so they aren’t crowded out.
Dawn might be a wee bit biased but she reckons miniature roses are again having a moment. “At most rose shows there are now at least as many miniatures shown as large roses and at the Canterbury Rose Society’s Christmas party there were actually more minis on display.”
In her 1985 book, Dawn wrote, “there are not many things you can be certain about these days… but miniature roses are here to stay. They have come too far to once again be lost as fashion and interests change.”
While many hobbies and passions in life grow from small to large, when it comes to roses this interest seems to go in the opposite direction. “Barry and I had a theory that rose lovers start off growing big hybrid teas with that classic bud shape, then they try floribundas and singles as they start to appreciate their simplicity, and from there they graduate to minis. And of course, once you’ve grown a perfect miniature, well, the big ones start to look a bit coarse.”
Plus they make people smile, adds Dawn. “When mine are in flower I’ll take a little bunch to my hairdresser and everyone there always goes into raptures over them.”