I’ve been meaning to mention a piece I read in the local paper a few months back. Dick Streeper, gung-ho local rose grower and one of the founders of the Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden in San Diego’s amazing Balboa Park, mentioned in his piece how “The world’s leading commercial association of rose producers, All-America Rose Selections, in business since 1939, has recently lost about two-thirds of its members. That has caused a substantial drop in rose sales and a drop in the numbers of good new varieties being introduced. Identifying and buying good, newly introduced roses is suddenly more difficult.”
I wonder, though, if the drop in rose sales actually led to the drop in AARS memberships and not the other way around. There was a point a couple decades back when the splashy hybrid teas and floribundas with their rose-show flower shapes started to get passed over as people seemed to move towards the nostalgic beauties of the David Austin roses, flowers that looked like old roses but had a lot of the modern rose qualities of more reliable repeat blooming and somewhat better disease resistance. Other breeders participated in this renaissance and old timey roses were all over.
It’d be interesting to sales reports for all these plants. I wonder if we, the fickle public, just got tired of them. Or at least we didn’t see anything new and shiny to take their place and stopped buying them in the same numbers. Roses can live for a long time, and really, how many roses do you need to buy in a lifetime? And for fickle gardeners, has there been anything new and exciting to cause us to uproot some of the plants we have?
I’ve mentioned before that I had over a hundred plants in the house where I grew up. My current living situation is down to just one rose. And that one got dug up from its spot in the garden and plopped in a pot this past autumn. It’s one of the plants I planted at my parent’s house in the 1970s and the only plant that I brought with me. I hope it survives the recent transplant. So far so good.
Opening Flower on Green Rose
Even that plant is the green rose, a variety dating to the early 1800s and possibly the 1700s. And the last rose I bought was one of our local species Rosa minutifolia (a rose which did not survive an attempted transplant). So you can see I haven’t been doing much lately to support rose breeders…
I grew this fiercely thorny rose, Rosa minutifolia, for over a decade. With wild-rose-pink flowers barely two inches across, its petals were crinkled and delicate, but the blooms were never particularly stunning when compared to the buxom, botoxed blooms of typical garden roses. The leaves were tiny to the point of almost being non-existent, and I’ve already mentioned the incredible number of thorns that made this just about the prickliest thing I’ve ever dealt with. (The only similarly thorny roses I can think of are a few heirloom moss roses like Alfred de Dalmas that I grew in my early teen rose-growing years.) So spiny is it that one of its early collectors proposed an alternate name for it: Rosa horrida. (Check out the fascinating tale of its discovery by Barbara Ertter here.)
In the end, I think I grew it partly because of its weirdly cool thorniness and its interesting story, but also because of its artificial, political rarity. In the United States, this rose is found only as a small island population along the Mexican border on Otay Mesa, here in San Diego County. This extreme rarity has placed it on California’s endangered species list. Skip south into Mexico a few dozen miles, however, and the plant begins to become a fairly common member of the chaparral plant community, forming great mounded thickets three to four feet high and many feet across. The notion that the plant is particularly rare is an artifact of national boundaries. Erase the US-Mexico border, and Rosa minutifolia becomes a mainstay of part of the pan-Californian ecosystem.
I find that to be a weird little mental game: Is the plant rare or not? What odd things do political boundaries do to how we understand the natural world that those boundaries are drawn over? Does that mean that it’s crazy to call this an endangered plant?
To that last question, I’ll answer that we really should consider it a plant to protect. We need to preserve what’s left of the diversity that remains in the world. If the plant goes extinct in California, it’s gone from California. Never mind that it has cousins south of the border.
And these days the purely conceptual notion of a national border is turning into a physical reality, as the ginormous border fence project turns the United States into a freakish zoo exhibit behind bars as this video produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows. (I also did a brief post related to all this recently, on the destruction of Smuggler’s Gulch.) When the only know U.S. population of this plant is further isolated from its southern kin, it becomes all the more desperate to preserve what little we have left.
When we were preparing the back yard for a small room addition we needed to move a few plants out of the way. My Rosa minutifolia was one of them. Used to near-desert conditions, the plant shoots down roots far into the ground, maybe even 20 feet deep. I guess I didn’t get enough of the roots, not to mention the fact that the transplant took place in the high heat of summer. The plant declined and then died over the course of a couple months.
I see the plant here and there. A native plant sale might have a few plants. The Tree of Life Nursery stocks it. Botanical gardens sometimes have a little thicket of it (or a massive thicket of it as is the case at Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden where “five rooted cuttings planted…in 1954 had become ‘one large tangled mass’ nearly 30 feet across by 1982″ [ source ]). All these photos are from the Huntington’s Desert Garden, where the rose grows alongside cactus and other things that make its spininess look right at home.
I get nostalgic whenever I see it. My little plant, which was set in awful, dense, dry soil in a much too shady spot, never grew or flowered much. Nipping at the dead branches kept it from forming a Rosa horrida thicket. But I continued to coddle it for whatever reasons any of us coddle interesting, under-performing plants. And one of these days I wouldn’t be surprised if I plant another little thicket of it.
