Let's Get Serious about Good Roses

 Veterans Honor lasts a week or more when cut.
Pope John Paul II (white) lasts several hours in a vase.

On Facebook, someone posted some actual rose photos, some extreme rose photos, and some Photoshops of roses. That made me comment about classical roses.

Ordering bare root roses gives the gardener more choices and a wide variety of prices. These are my favorites, based on my experience growing and sharing them.

 Mr. Lincoln turns darker in the vase, sometimes purple.
The newer reds stay red, but Mr. Lincoln remains an inexpensive and domineering
rose bush.

The two best red roses are Mr. Lincoln and Veterans Honor. The first has the strongest fragrance and longest stems. Veterans Honor is perfect in every way, a smaller plant with enormous blooms that last in the vase.

We always plant Queen Elizabeth in memory
of Bethany Joan Marie and Erin Joy, our daughters.

Queen Elizabeth is the ultimate Creation rose, developed by a Lutheran PhD in genetics who argued for the Genesis Creation throughout his professional life. If the faculty of Concordia Seminary grew Queen E roses, they would be Creation stalwarts instead of abandoning Biblical doctrine.

The Peace rose must be ordered early.

Peace is not a fragrant rose, but it blooms light yellow and forms pink tints along the edges of the blooms. The rose produces well but is a little more prone to blackspot, but that malady is over-rated. I ignore blackspot and cut the speckled leaves away.

 Double the color, double the fragrance - Double Delight.

Double Delight is a bolder bi-color, darker pink and cream, with plenty of fragrance. The rose is popular, easy to grow, and loved by everyone. I believe it is related to Peace.

 This Easy Does It is wearing its sunset livery.

 This Easy Does It was purer orange, which confused me,
because I had three bargain EDIs and they were fickle in their coloring, but now I realize that it their nature.

Easy Does It is my favorite for growing and cutting. When all else seems bleak, Easy Does It is producing. Besides that, the rose is priced to please, unlike the untested glamor roses brought out each year with breathless copy. The colors range from pure orange to sunset colors. The stems are very long for a rose, especially for a floribunda, which are normally long on color, short on the stems.

 Bride's Dream is the largest rose bloom. Note its size in relation to the rose farmer's hand.

Bride's Dream is a large plant with very large pink blooms.

 Fragrant Cloud will fill a room with rose fragrance.
Its color is hard to define: brick seems unfair.

Fragrant Cloud is an older rose I bought when fragrance was rather rare. Fragrant Cloud is powerfully fragrant with perfect buds and blooms. The color is hard to define. Brick is not fair, but it is not exactly pink or orange.

Roses love:

1. Plenty of rain water, or at least stored water that has given up its chlorine to evaporation.
2. Rich soil with plenty of mulch, compost, manure, and earth worms.
3. Morning sun and afternoon shade.
4. Lots of pruning.

Roses hate:

• Chemical fertilizer - bad for the soil and soil creatures.
• Fungicide - bad for fungus, which is the network feeding all plants. No, really. Before Local Area Networks (LANs) - fungus. God's design, engineering, and flawless maintenance.
• Insecticide - kills everything, especially the beneficial insects and spiders that protect the roses. Hint - Creation.
• Roasting in the sun on the west side of the house. That is where tomatoes and butterfly plants thrive.
• Being crowded. Give them room among their own, but foster low growing cover plants, like wild strawberries, clover dandelions (I do not lie), and hostas.

 Falling in Love shows off its colors - with a cute little beneficial doing its job. The rose is fragrant and loved by students and neighbors. I often have beneficial Hover Flies and Ichneumon Wasps buzzing the roses as I create vases of them outdoors on the Lincoln Town car hood.