A rose, is a rose, is a rose...
Not So! It's seems there's an infinate number of rose varieties. All of them are beautiful--and many of them are blooming now!
Not often do I wish I lived in New York City, but perhaps I'm feeling a little twinge today after reading this.
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Romancing the Rose in Its Infinite Splendor
Michael Falco for The New York Times
By GLENN COLLINS
Published: June 22, 2007
AS they always have — and absolutely must — during Rose Month at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, fanciers of the queen of flowers will stop, stoop and smell the roses, inhaling the splendor of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden throughout the month of June. But this year visitors will discover a 1.04-acre garden that has been redefined. After undergoing a comprehensive, six-month, $2.5 million refurbishing, the rose garden is presenting its largest and most varied collection ever: 3,373 plants in 621 varieties.
“What you love about roses, aside from their beauty,” says Peter E. Kukielski, self-described “rose geek” and curator of the garden’s rose collections, “is their names and their stories. It’s fun to personify them.”
As rose lovers visit individually or in groups of “rose friends,” they will find that the garden’s 83 beds, radiating from its central gazebo, have been reorganized and repopulated. New walkways, railings, permanent signs and other embellishments have been installed, in addition to extensive, if often invisible, infrastructure improvements that are intended to ensure that the future of the garden is comfortably rosy.
This weekend there is a busy roster of rose-related tours led by experts, question-and-answer sessions with the garden staff and home-gardening demonstrations. (See accompanying box.) But now, beyond this, the collection itself, the tapestry woven of the garden’s grand inventory, has more big blocks of color. Reds and pinks and whites and oranges and butter yellows fill the garden’s irregular triangular lot, with its planting area of 19,288 square feet. And visitors will encounter a more chronological presentation of the garden’s roses as well.
“We needed to expand the collection to keep up with rose hybridizers and to rationalize our heritage collection,” said Gregory Long, president of the mile-long, 250-acre Botanical Garden, a national historic landmark where roses have been grown since 1790.
A year ago the Botanical Garden brought in a rosarian, or cultivator of roses, from Atlanta, Peter E. Kukielski, whose formal title is curator of the Botanical Garden’s rose collections. He culled 400 of some 2,000 plants, those he deemed underperforming and unsuited to the location; then he added 1,703 new plants.
The setting of the rose garden, to the southeast in the Botanical Garden where it is bordered by the Bronx River Parkway, is a natural bowl just down the hill from the picturesque Stone Cottage, which dates to the mid-19th century, when the surrounding land was part of the Lorillard estate. The slopes of its margins are punctuated by weathered outcrops of Fordham gneiss.
There in 1916, at what is believed to have been the site of a Lorillard garden and pond, the current rose garden was planned, along with its fencing and gazebo, by Beatrix Jones Farrand, a niece of Edith Wharton and the most fashionable landscape designer of her era, Mr. Long said.
But the rose plantings established there were a stepchild of the Botanical Garden for decades, and the rose garden offered few amenities, since the plot was three-quarters of a mile, and a 15-minute walk, from the visitor hubbub near the Enid Haupt Conservatory. Now the garden’s trams make the 13-minute trip from the new visitors center every 10 minutes on weekends.
In the 1980s David Rockefeller donated $1 million in the memory of his wife, Peggy, to renovate the rose garden, creating new gates, fencing, walkways and a gazebo, all following the Farrand plan; it opened to the public in 1988.
Now the gazebo and iron lattice fencing have been refurbished and repainted. (The fence is considerably more than ornamental, since it discourages the Botanical Garden’s omnivorous rabbit population, which yearns for rose roots.)
The renovation has also brought the installation of large new decorative medallions of Hudson Valley bluestone at the main western entranceway, and new bluestone border pathways that now augment the crunchy gray stone-dust walks that were the signature of the previous garden. There are also new iron railings and boxwood borders by the main granite staircase to the west.
A sophisticated system of automated irrigation has been installed to keep the flowers watered on hot summer days. The drainage system needed drastic improvement as well, since in severe storms the garden “could be underwater,” Mr. Kukielski said. “Ducks used to swim among the roses,” he added.
For the first time each of the rose garden’s three entrances has its own welcoming garden: pinks and whites at the north, purples and oranges at the south and reds and apricots at the main western entrance.
The four tree roses at the north entrance, a variety named Pillow Fight — their hue is an appropriately fluffy white — are flanked by new varieties like Mystic Beauty and Borderer.
Pillow Fight, Mr. Kukielski explained during a tour on a recent afternoon, is a rare seedling of a hybrid called Gourmet Popcorn, and in the garden the miniature flowers of these white roses have been situated next to their Pillow Fight offspring “because we wanted to tell that story,” he said.
The tree-rose stars of the south entrance are four examples of a new variety called Burgundy Iceberg, a floribunda the color of Burgundy wine.
The main entrance too features some new celebrities: four newly introduced tree roses called Home Run, surrounded by apricots and reds that include Soft Morning and Sans Souci.
Mr. Kukielski said he hoped that the garden could now serve as a living encyclopedia of historic and modern roses. Therefore the eastern border of the garden is now a chronology of cultivation, the garden’s heritage rose collection of varieties — stretching from north to south — that existed generally before 1867, when the first hybrid tea rose, La France, was created. Though there are classic roses in other sections of the garden, they will be consolidated at the eastern margin during the next year.
To the north are species roses, those wild plants that evolved under natural selection. And a group of Rosa gallicas, the first hybridized class of roses, has been moved to the heritage bed, including varieties like Charles de Mills, introduced about 1790, and Cardinal de Richelieu, introduced about 1845.
The library of rose classics also includes damasks, albas, centifolias, China roses, moss roses, Portlands, Bourbons and hybrid perpetuals.
A first for the garden is the display of its collection of Barni roses from Italy, which combine the scent and shape of old roses with the vigor and repeat-flowering penchant of modern hybrids. The Barnis are new to the American rose scene, Mr. Kukielski said, and include exquisitely hued Rita Levis, Montalcinis and Silvina Donvitos.
Also on view is a new collection of Kordes roses from Germany. They are not only fragrant and beautiful, Mr. Kukielski said, but disease resistant as well, requiring no fungicides.
“What you love about roses, aside from their beauty,” he said, “is their names and their stories. It’s fun to personify them.” One example is Elizabeth Taylor — a deep pink hybrid tea rose — planted in the garden next to Julia Child, a butter yellow floribunda. Julia is adjacent to Betty Boop, a white-pink floribunda.
“The right plant in the right place can tell a story worthy of a novel,” Mr. Kukielski added. He offered as an example a plant called Peggy Martin Survivor, a vivid pink cutting from a New Orleans rose fancier’s important backyard collection. Though 450 of Ms. Martin’s heirloom plants were washed away during Hurricane Katrina, the Survivor was the lone rose to bloom again after the waters subsided.
A ruddy, sturdy, self-described “rose geek,” Mr. Kukielski, 41, said of roses on a recent afternoon that “they like to eat a lot and drink a lot, and I do too, so we get along very well together.”
Before joining the Botanical Garden last year, Mr. Kukielski — pronounced koo-KEL-ski — ran his own Atlanta-based company, the Rose Petaler Inc., creating estate rose collections.
A native Nebraskan who came to Atlanta at 5 and grew up there, Mr. Kukielski developed his love of roses from his mother, Elizabeth, and by working in the garden with his grandmother, Helen Gillen.
How did he become a rose geek? “They catch your soul,” he said. “The color, the scent, the uniqueness of them.”
And when people ask him what his favorite rose is, he tells them, “Whatever is blooming that day.”
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Time to go out and do a little pruning and fertilizing and see what's blooming in my garden today! I love Peace, and Mr. Lincoln. But then...I'm a progressive! What about you?
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