Stressed roses, or why should I bother with more?

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I do love roses, even the miniature ones I have, but right now they’re so stressed that I’m wondering whether they will survive – they have been attacked by what looks like black ants that especially like chomping on the buds and the flowers – if the buds actually open, they’re already infected! My beautiful red rose was about to give me a ton of flowers when the whole thing got ruined by these stupid insects. The one most affected is the red rose, the white one seems more affected by what I still think is powdery mildew, but it is more in control now. And the yellow rose as well. I have sprayed them with organic sprays and with commercial ones, and so far neither seems to have done much. I’m afraid to spray them too much, as I figure they might die. So at the moment I’m leaving them alone, watering them, fertilizing them and seeing if they re-bound. I also plan to put mashed up garlic around the base of the plants (hey, it couldn’t possibly hurt!). I would love to buy more roses, especially when I see them in the store, but this reminds me why I don’t! They really take an amazing amount of work. Yet when they bloom, it’s such a reward, because they’re so beautiful. My friends David and Kathy Van Hemel gave me a book, Passion for Roses, by Peter Beales, and looking at the gorgeous pictures is enough to make me drool and wish for a very large garden and tons of roses…I would especially love a trellis so I could have climbing roses…sigh…but the reality is , I think, that a lot of roses are not very hardy, especially hybrids. If I had a garden, I would definitely go for the older varieties. Less flashy, maybe, but hardier. Of course it didn’t help that when I first started I clustered all my roses together, thus creating a monoculture that made them exceedingly susceptible to disease and pests…what one got, they all did..I used to have four roses, one was a beautiful shade of sunset pink and orange, but it was attacked by something and never recovered. My mother, of course, avoids monocultures by planting her roses in between other plants. Yet the hardiest of her roses is a very simple one, it’s white, and the buds have a tinge of pink; she told me it came from one of my grandfather’s farms (at one point he had two, a loooong time ago, he died in 1969). She called it a “wild rose” though I wonder if it is truly wild or indigenous to El Salvador. It seems unlikely, yet I suppose it could be. I don’t know enough about roses or Salvadoran flora to figure that one out! The roses I don’t like, because it seems to me that they take all the work out of- and thus the satisfaction – of growing roses – are the ‘Knock-out’ roses – they are ever blooming, are very heat resistant and pest resistant and just keep going and going…they seem a bit unreal to me, and of course have become tremendously popular in Houston…I have to say I’d rather have less roses, and even struggle with them and pull my hair out when I can figure what’s wrong with them, than roses I don’t have to have anything to do with! =)

• 26 Apr, 2008
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