Several years ago, I attended an all-day gardening seminar. One of the speakers, an expert on antique rose cultivation, presented a beautiful slideshow of old garden roses that do well in our difficult climate. Antique roses attracted me because I wanted my garden free of chemicals, and I knew this type of rose was much less likely to become diseased than the hybrid tea roses grown in most gardens. I thought they were prettier, too.
When the speaker got to the part of her lecture about caring for old garden roses, she said something to the effect of: "Plant them. Feed them once. They will live or they will die."
That was it. Plant them. Leave them alone. They'll make it or they won't. I didn't know at the time, but the antique rose woman's words would have a profound effect on my approach to gardening, and on my attitude toward almost everything in life.
I live in a mild, very humid area with a great deal of rain. Rain is good for roses, but unless there is a lot of sun to dry the leaves quickly, roses will develop black spot. My gardens do not get much sun because trees surround the property. It is only through strategic planting that I can grow roses at all. I have some that are not as sun-hungry as the average rose, and have planted several in pots so I can place them in the sun. One small patch of sunny space contains an entire garden of miniature roses.
I feed the roses at the beginning of the season with an organic food. I give them a major pruning in February, and a minor pruning in August. Aside from making sure they get enough water, removing dead canes, and treating them for powdery mildew once a year, I do little more. Do they get black spot? Yes and several other fungal diseases for which I have no names. I have suggested, at certain times during the summer, that my gardens be placed on the community's garden tour so that I can show off my exotic varieties of fungi.
Spraying the roses with a dormant spray at the end of the season helps, though I often forget to do it. Interestingly, though a few varieties of my roses didn’t survive, I am positive they did not die of black spot. They died because they just didn't like the garden.
Sometimes a rose gets a bit of black spot and then straightens itself out. Sometimes most of the plant becomes infected, and when that happens, I defoliate it. This may sound like a radical procedure, but the plant develops new healthy leaves quickly. Not long ago, when I was buying birdseed, I met a woman with a serious rose garden. She said she had mostly hybrid teas, and I told her I didn't because I had an organic garden. Our conversation went something like this:
"And they don't get black spot?"
"Oh, yes, they do from time to time."
"But not too bad?"
"Sometimes very bad."
"What do you do if you don't spray?"
"I defoliate them."
"You defoliate them?"
"I defoliate them."
I might as well have said I set fire to them from her shocked expression. Defoliation isn't something I read in a book; it is merely an extension of "they will live or they will die." And so far, it has worked quite well.
Cutting plants back radically works too. My night-blooming cereus looked terrible at the end of last summer. The leaves looked splotchy and lifeless. It wasn't easy, whacking off two or three feet of growth, but it felt like the right thing to do. It was. This spring, the leaves grew rapidly, once again sprawling all over the place; the plant already has produced several beautiful flowers.
The thing about gardening is—you can do everything right and still have a failure. Unseen pests, a sudden mineral deficiency in the soil, or a change in climate can keep plants from performing the way you expect them to. One of the highlights of late spring occurs when my spider lily blooms. This year, it finally clumped, and I was looking forward to the possibility of more than one bloom spike. Instead, I got nothing. The spike on the mother plant emerged, grew a few inches, and then died. The leaves became brown and soft. Since I have no idea what happened, I cannot fix it. I can only hope it was just "one of those things," and look forward to next year's show.
For the past few years, my daylilies, with the exception of one stand of beautiful apricot miniatures, haven't looked too healthy. This year, for reasons that escape me, they looked much better. However, the always-reliable miniatures developed some type of blight and didn't bloom at all. I dug them up and set them aside so that I can inspect and treat them. That is how gardening is: just when you think you have something figured out, some other frustrating thing pops up.
It works the other way around too. You can neglect a plant and get wonderful results. I have a lacecap hydrangea that, out of habit, I toss food at every year. But it usually never blooms. Except this year, for some reason, it did, and the flowers were beautiful. A friend of mine has a chestnut rose that remained bloomless for decades. One winter, she went outside and threatened it with removal if it didn't bloom; that spring, it burst forth with an abundance of flowers. On the other hand, this spring, her always-prolific “Lady Banks” rose didn't yield a single flower, and we have no idea why.
It is possible to exert more control over a garden than we do, but the consequences are great, and even environment-threatening chemicals do not solve all problems. In The Language of Flowers, essayist Bailey White wrote about a friend who married a man who transformed her humble landscape into a showpiece with terraces, rock walls, a pool, and a wildflower meadow. He devised a complex sprinkling system that delivered pesticides and fungicides strategically throughout the garden. Eventually, the garden became so grand that horticulturists made special trips to see it.
White's friend developed severe allergies that could not be treated, and her life became miserable. Then cancer came, and within three months, she was dead, leaving behind a perfect garden totally void of birds.
When you garden, nature is your partner. She is both older and wiser than you, and it is a good idea to let her lead the way.
