a signature plant: green rose

Parts of my gar­den look like flo­ral red light dis­tricts, with wild, come-hither plants that beg shame­lessly for your atten­tion. I do appre­ci­ate a binge of excess every now and then, but often find myself com­ing back to one of the most hum­ble plants in the gar­den, the green rose, Rosa chi­nen­sis virid­i­flora.

Green Rose in BudOpening Flower on Green RoseA few blog­gers have been post­ing posts on what they con­sider to be their sig­na­ture plant. (Thanks to Tina at In the Gar­den who got the dis­cus­sion going.) It’s hard to pick just one, but I’d have to say this plant, the only rose in the gar­den, is high on my list. It’s noth­ing super-flashy, but I find it qui­etly inter­est­ing. And the plant has an intrigu­ing history.

A Spray of flowers of the Green RoseI did a post on the green rose over a year ago. I won’t repeat all the details from the first post but you can see my notes here.

The pic­ture I had at the time to accom­pany the post, how­ever, was pretty sad unless you want an instruc­tive photo of what it looks like when it suf­fers one of its rare attacks of pow­dery mildew. To com­pen­sate for that ear­lier ugli­ness, I took these greatly improved pho­tos of it this past week­end, when I noticed that the plant was look­ing extra-nice.

Even when the plant is in full bloom–which is much of the year–it’s easy to walk past it. A shame­less hussy it’s not. But a rose with only sepals and no petals? A rose that goes back at least to the early 1800s and maybe ear­lier? Now that’s interesting!

December 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • | 5 Comments »

the kindness of strangers

I love big, splashy plants as much as the next per­son, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a spe­cial attach­ment to that’s nei­ther big nor splashy.

Green rose

The green rose, Rosa chi­nen­sis virid­i­flora, lives up to its name. When the “flow­ers” open, what’s inside the pro­tec­tive sepals is cer­tainly green. But there are no rose petals in sight. The blos­som just keeps on open­ing, reveal­ing more and more sepals, all of them green in color, some­times tinged with a red­dish cin­na­mon color. Inside a typ­i­cal rose, once the sepals unfurl and the petals open, you finally get to the pis­tils and sta­mens, the repro­duc­tive parts that enable sex­ual repro­duc­tion and per­pet­u­a­tion of the species. But this plant lacks them too, just like it lacks petals. If this plant were to turn up in nature, it’d go extinct once the sin­gle plant passed on.

Its his­tory is a lit­tle fuzzy, though it was for sure intro­duced to the rose-growing world in 1856 by Bem­bridge and Har­ri­son in Eng­land. In The his­tory of the rose by Roy E. Shep­perd, the author notes that the plant has been in cul­ti­va­tion since 1743, which for a plant with no hopes of repro­duc­tion by seeds is quite a feat. Through the years, peo­ple have found some­thing about this plant inter­est­ing enough to start cut­tings or make grafts onto root­stock or whole­sale dig up the plant and take it along with them when they move.

I was a rose geek in my early teen years, grow­ing and exhibit­ing roses around the Los Ange­les area. At one point I had some­thing over a hun­dred roses, includ­ing this one. I moved down to San Diego, and by the later 1980s finally had a house with room for plants. My par­ents were mov­ing out of the home­stead, and for some rea­son I felt the need to res­cue this one rose from an uncer­tain future. Of all the roses, I dug up this one and moved only this one. Read­ing through some of the posts on this rose at davesgarden.com–includ­ing some­one who moved her great grandmother’s plant–I’m not the only with an attach­ment to it.

And some­how, through the kind­ness of strangers smit­ten with this won­der­fully weird plant, the green rose has stayed in cul­ti­va­tion for some­thing like 264 years.

December 10 2007 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: • | 3 Comments »