18 April 2011

Best rose books for the Amazon Kindle?

E-readers are becoming more popular and the Amazon Kindle is one of the leaders. Amazon also has a large store of e-books. What about rose books?

Roses are at the bottom of a deep pile of menus. Navigating through Lifestyle & Home > Home & Garden > Gardening & Horticulture > Flowers > Roses one finds a total of 112 books in this latter category. What riches! Well, actually no. Most are duds.

Almost all are aimed at providing the complete beginner with basic rose growing information. However, most of these are of very dubious provenance, churned out by the e-book twilight zone with odd names of publishers and odder author's pseudonyms. An amazing number have titles starting "101 tips…" no doubt because at some time starting with a numeral got them to the top of lists.

In all this dubious abundance where is the rosarian to turn? One of the few e-titles I have no difficulty recommending is "A Year of Roses" by Stephen Scanniello.

The author is a real rosarian of the highest order, he writes with clarity and light prose and the reader has the impression that they are getting the benefit of real hard-won experience. It is an excellent book for the beginner and even the experienced rose-grower can enjoy seeing roses through other eyes.

But Amazon should cleanse the Augean stable of the Kindle store and get some meaty rose titles installed.

10 April 2011

The Lady Banks Rose - Rosa banksiae

When I was growing up in England we had a large double yellow Lady Banks' Rose (LBR) on the north side of our house. It is said to be a very tender rose and only to thrive on south facing walls, but this rose flowered prolifically on its north wall which must have been sheltered enough for its liking.

Perhaps because of this I have always had a soft spot for the LBR. However I rather prefer the double white and the single yellow to the double yellow, which looks a bit too much like the blossoms of the double Kerria for my taste. It is also the cultivar with the least strong scent. All the other varieties have an even stronger scent of violets.

The LBR comes in four varieties - the single white (presumably the original form), the single yellow, the double white and double yellow. Coming from Southern China they are none too hardy. One of the saddest sights is the small straggling LBR plant that grows in one of the hothouses of the Montreal Botanic Garden - it would not last five minutes outside in the winters of Montreal.

Arizona suits it better. Talking to a friend recently I was reminded of the incredible "Tombstone Rose" a double white LBR that was planted over 100 years ago and is now the largest rosebush in the world. An immigrant couple, a Scottish mining engineer and his wife brought material to Arizona from Scotland in the 1880s. The subsequent story of this amazing rose bush is well documented and very touching. Now it covers a whole yard and has an undisputed place in the Guinness Book of Records.

Originally found in Canton, the double white LBR was brought to Britain in 1807 by William Kerr and since then has made its way to many parts of the world.

Roses for Wet Sites

It is commonly written that roses are not for poorly drained sites. They hate getting their feet wet and growing them under wet conditions is a sure recipe for blackspot and disaster. Well, not so fast.

That may be true of garden roses with dry-loving Mediterranean species in their parentage, but actually a large group of North American wild roses are wetland plants, or at least occur in riparian (stream-bank) habitats. Rosa palustris, as its name implies is a trues swamp species, occurring in marshes, bogs, swamplands in eastern north America. The swamp rose of western north America is Rosa pisocarpa.

In the high rainfall areas of southern China roses must be tolerant of seasonal flooding and one of these is Rosa multiflora. Where this has been introduced into North American it has become a pest in wet riparian areas. Another Asian species that is adapted to wet subtropical conditions is Rosa clinophylla of Burma and Nepal.

The good news is that cultivated roses derived from these wild roses should be tolerant of at least seasonal wetness. Boggy gardens need not be rose-free.

Swamp roses of North America
  • Rosa palustris
  • Rosa pisocarpa

Wet-tolerant and riparian roses of North America
  • Rosa virginiana
  • Rosa nitida
  • Rosa acicularis
  • Rosa carolina
  • Rosa woodsii

Wet-tolerant Asian roses
  • Rosa multiflora
  • Rosa clinophylla (monsoon climate of Burma)