Coming to a Garden Near You in 2013

Decisions, decisions – which of these twelve new roses will you add to your garden this year? All will be available in the spring from Star® Roses and Plants/Conard-Pyle:

Popcorn Drift®

Francis Meilland

Hydrangealicious, part of the Look-A-Likes™ series

Eyeconic® Pomegranate Lemonade

Eyeconic® Melon Lemonade

Cinnamon Dolce™

Raspberry Cream Twirl™

BIg Momma™

Cloud 10™

Dark Night™

Phloxy Baby, part of the Look-A-Likes™ series

Tequila Gold™

Popcorn Drift® is the newest addition to the Drift® groundcover series. It starts yellow and then fades to a cream white. Drift® Roses have many of the same great characteristics as The Knock Out® Family of Roses, but are much smaller in habit.

Francis Meilland™ is the 2013 AARS winner. This tall Hybrid Tea rose with a very large bloom, good exhibition form and strong fragrance is a multiple award winner in Europe. It is named to commemorate the centenary of Francis Meilland’s birth and to honor of our historic relationship with Meilland International, the breeder behind the historic Peace rose and our most recent series Drift.

Look-A-Likes® Hydrangealicious is a unique new hybrid shrub rose with dense flower clusters of small red blooms with a white eye that almost look like a Hydrangea!  Like Drift® Roses, this variety is low-growing and easy to maintain.

The Eyeconic® series of Hulthemia roses is an exciting addition to our lineup of roses. This year we are introducing two new varieties — Eyeconic® Pomegranate Lemonade and Eyeconic® Melon Lemonade. This series grows best in the Western United States. Eyeconic Pomegranate Lemonade is a diminutive rose with large deep pink flowers and terrific novelty. All the varieties in this series have unique coloring with the characteristic red Hulthemia blotch in the center.

Cinnamon Dolce™ has brick red petals dusted with pink spots and is very fragrant.  This variety needs the dry heat of the West to thrive.

Raspberry Cream Twirl™ is the first striped climber to have a true modern rose exhibition-type flower.

Big Momma™ is a big, pink, very fragrant Hybrid Tea that is great for cutting.

Cloud 10™ is a pure white climbing rose that has a very full flower similar to the English roses. It is hardy to zone 6 (in zone 5 it would be more like a large shrub). It will do great everywhere, but especially in the South and all areas troubled with black spot.

Dark Night™ is a new, well-tested novel rose for the West Coast. The color is dark velvet red, almost black, with a cream yellow reverse. The flower form is classic with a high centered bud and a cuplike opening.

Look-A-Likes® Phloxy Baby is a Polyantha Hybrid from the hybridizer of The Knock Out® Rose. It displays extremely good disease resistance and is more upright than most Polyantha roses. It would be perfect for use as a hedge. It attracts bees and is hardy to zone 5.

Tequila Gold™ is a mutation of Tequila™, one of our most popular new landscape roses. Like its parent, it produces a symphony of bright color nonstop through the season. The bright golden color will shine as a bright spot in any modern garden. Can be grown as a specimen or a hedge for stronger effect. Great for landscaping in dry hot climates, and also with good performance on the East Coast. One of the very few good yellow landscape roses.

Read All About It: Recent Articles About Knock Out® and Drift® Roses

Here is some recent coverage on Knock Out® and Drift® Roses that may offer you some inspiring ideas for your own garden:

Tales of a Nashville Gardener takes a look at Peach Drift®

Great Design Plant: Knock Out® Roses

Drifts of Roses for Small Spaces

Knocked Out by Knock Out® Roses

Knock Out® Rose Garden Plans

Landscaper Picks New Favorites

Fall is a Great Time for Planting Roses

Fall is not just a time to plant your spring bulbs and enjoy colorful foliage, it is also an excellent time to plant roses.

The Knock Out® Family of Roses and Drift® Roses are perfect for fall planting. The sun is still able to nurture a newly planted rose and the cool nights are perfect for keeping new plants moist.

Pick a sunny spot, with at least six hours of sunlight, and space your roses about two to three feet apart. Dig a hole that is about twice as wide as the pot, and a little bit deeper than the height of the pot. When planting Knock Out® or Drift® Roses, you do not need to add fertilizer. You should also use your hand to gently loosen the roots before putting the rose in the hole and filling in with dirt. Watering is important –  about one to two gallons per plant is good.

In most climates, as the days grow darker, your rose will get ready for winter.

Click here to see what rosarian Paul Zimmerman, contributor to Fine Gardening magazine, has to say about planting roses in the fall – and how to find some bargains at your local garden center.

The Story of Drift® Roses

Timing is everything, it just takes longer with roses.

By Jacques Ferare

The story of how the Drift® roses came to be is quite interesting, albeit painstakingly long, even by rose standards. It illustrates once again that rose breeding is not for the impatient and that creating a full series takes an inordinate amount of time given the genetic disparity with which creative rose breeders work.

Believe it or not, the prototype for the series was sent to our Pennsylvania location in 1992 under the lovely name of CP4589. For the record, and if you follow this blog, you know it was the same year that we received The Knock Out® Rose, which was known then as CP4642. As we know, Knock Out® went on to become the most popular new rose introduction ever released by Star® Roses and Plants, while in the meantime this great little thing was totally ignored.

It was a tiny white rose with five small petals and very dark glossy foliage. It performed really well in our trials in the following season, but the plant was not taller than a foot and not even twice as wide at the end of the season. Amazing when you think about it today, but at that time, in the early 1990s (20 years ago already, time flies when you’re having fun) it was considered way too small for commercial release! The trade was looking for larger shrubs, and nobody showed any interest in a miniature ground cover rose.

The Drift® rose thrived under test conditions.

However, as we usually do when we look at seedlings that perform outstandingly in our difficult climate of South Eastern Pennsylvania (we did not called the trial area “Rose Hell” yet), we hung on to it for the next few years. Then in 1996, Jacques Mouchotte, the director of research at the House of Meilland, sent us a series of very similar seedlings that we dubbed “Mini-Meidiland®.”  They looked indeed like the smaller siblings of our Meidiland® lansdcape shrub roses, but on a much smaller scale. Meidiland® were quite successful at the time, but one of the comments was that they were growing very big and therefore did not fit all landscape situations.

It took some time, but we eventually saw the light and became quite excited because we finally realized such roses could be very successful. (Again, if you follow this blog, you’ll notice that yours truly can be a bit slow at times). Unfortunately none of the seedlings sent that year ended up performing to the level of that original code from 1992. The idea was right, but the genetics not quite there yet. However, patience being one of the most needed virtues in rose hybridizing (and selection!), the efforts continued every year after that and finally by 2004 we were looking at five other seedlings — this time with the characteristics we were looking for.

Ironically, the prototype, known as White Drift® when it was introduced, is no longer in commerce.

The Drift® series was finally ready for prime time. It was pre-released commercially in the Northeast region in spring 2007. The reception was way beyond expectations. Not only did they bloom all summer, but they also proved to be significantly more resistant to black spot than originally thought, and they kept their compact habit all season in climates where plants tend to grow fairly big given the right conditions. They were also performing extremely well in trials all around the country, including that cursed area for roses known as the Deep South. So Drift® Roses were released full scale in spring 2008 — a mere 16 years after we saw the prototype and 19 years after it was created by a visionary breeder at Meilland. Today they are still gaining in  popularity in a way that is not without resemblance to what we saw with Knock Out® in the early years.

The Times They are a-Changin’

… The First Time We Didn’t Spray the Rose Fields

By Jacques Ferare

It is interesting how things and perceptions change over time. I remember very clearly the first time we tried to grow our rose novelties without spraying for diseases.  It was around 1992, right after I came back from the annual June meeting that Meilland International holds for their agent distributors. At that particular meeting, we heard a presentation from their German agent telling everyone in the room that they were quitting spraying roses that year in the test gardens.

At that time (which is still true today) municipalities and Lander (the equivalent of States), under the influence of the Grune (the green part in Germany) had decided they would not allow any more spraying in public gardens. This decision had a big influence on home gardeners who decided to do the same. As a result, all German rose growers had no choice but to introduce roses that did not need tender loving care (a.k.a. spraying every other week). So the whole presentation was about how they had to change their research protocols to make sure that they would select new roses for this new environment.

I thought this was the best idea I ever heard, so when I returned to West Grove, PA (Conard-Pyle headquarters), I shared this wonderful new approach to selection. The detail that I forgot (and, in all fairness, did not know at the time) is that whatever disease pressure there is in Germany is NOTHING compared to what we experience in the hot, muggy, disease-central climate of Southeastern Pennsylvania. This is why when I hear all these claims about German roses being so superior, I can’t help but take it with a grain of salt. But once again I digress. Rust, Mildews, Cercospora, Anthracnose, and of course black spot, without naming Xanthomonas and a few other exotic diseases, we get them all in West Grove. In retrospect, it is almost unbelievable that until the late 1960s we were growing roses commercially here. But I digress again.

The test fields at Conard-Pyle Co. in West Grove, PA.

So, first thing I did when I came back from that meeting was to tell Dick Hutton that we should quit spraying our fields. Right now. Right then. Dick, being Dick, did not say anything and so I took it as, well, he is OK with it. So I went to the crew that took care of the field at that time and instructed them not to spray anymore. At that time we were on a 3-week spray schedule. At the time, we were monitoring mostly Hybrid Teas and Floribundas, and that cycle was long enough to differentiate the decent ones from the bad ones.

Of course, back then, selecting for disease resistance was in its infancy, and the result did not take long. By Aug. 1, there was almost nothing to look at. Everything was defoliated, except for a couple of Rugosas, and a couple of new ground cover roses from Meilland. Knock Out® and Drift® Roses were still either on the drawing board or in the very early phases of their existence. Needless to say, the other folks at Conard-Pyle were not too happy with me, so we resumed spraying. But, the damage was done. That year, instead of the 20-25 potential new seedlings we usually selected to move forward, we barely had 5 – all of which were shrub roses. The main one to come out was a red ground cover that became Fire Meidiland. We also introduced a couple of the Rugosas. But in terms of the “traditional garden roses” — you can forgetaboutit!  Nothing. Nada. The genetics of those plants could not stand up to the disease pressure. This was a great eye opener for me at the beginning of my career. Thankfully, we were ahead of our time. Dick knew it, but bless his heart, let me make the mistake. Because we both knew it was the right thing to do, and eventually we would be proven right.

If they can survive “Rose Hell,” they may someday make it into a garden near you.

The following year, we started to segregate shrub roses in a true no-spray area, and kept the “regular” field sprayed, although at a much reduced level. And finally, in 2000, we switched to completely no-spray conditions. Eight to ten years later, thanks to the vision of Meilland and Bill Radler, breeder of The Knock Out® Rose, we evaluate all roses under no spray, the way they told us so, but more importantly, we can now bring to the consumer all kinds of roses — including Hybrid Teas — that will finally withstand the “Rose Hell” concept that our German friends developed way back when my hair still had color.

A Trip to Arkansas

By Steve Hutton

Last week I joined my Conard-Pyle colleague and fellow blogger, Kyle McKean, for a couple of days with P. Allen Smith at an event in Little Rock.  Twenty-four garden bloggers from around the country got together to tour some local gardens and to spend one day visiting Allen’s stunning Garden Home Retreat.  Kyle and I were there to talk about Conard-Pyle’s rose introduction program, focusing on our 80-year relationship with the storied French rose breeding firm, Meilland International.

P. Allen Smith’s rose garden.

Kyle and I first saw Allen’s two acre rose garden about a year ago, as the first roses were being planted.  At that time, the garden’s bones were in place — beds laid out and hedged with boxwood, garden structures and gates in place, pleached oaks surrounding the entire garden.

What a difference a year makes!  All beds were fully planted and the roses had just finished their first flush of bloom.  Outside the garden and on a slope leading down to it a large bed was being prepared in which masses of Drift® Roses and companion plants would soon be installed.  Inside the garden a wide range of shrubs, perennials and annuals were integrated in a painterly way with several dozen different varieties of roses.  I told the guest bloggers that in my view Allen had succeeded in creating a model rose garden–one in which roses were less than 50 percent of the plants in the design.  For me, this is a key factor in any successful rose garden.  Roses are plants, not museum pieces, and are at their most striking when they are creatively combined with other types and colors of plants, not set off by themselves as if they had no fit companions.

In addition to a superb garden on a majestic hillside overlooking the Arkansas River, the choice of rose varieties made its own statement.  Allen’s focus at The Garden Home Retreat is on sustainable living, and we helped him select varieties that would not need chemical sprays in order to thrive.  The “modern” portion of the rose palette (Allen wanted to emphasize three centuries of roses in America) was therefore comprised of varieties of the Knock Out® and Drift® families of roses, as well as disease resistant traditional roses from Meilland International (the breeders of the Drift® series) and Bill Radler (breeder of the Knock Out ® series).

Our day at The Garden Home Retreat was a warm one, but when the sun went down we ended it the perfect way–with locally-sourced ingredients given a southern accent and transformed into a very special meal.

Popcorn Drift® Rose Introduced at California Spring Trials

It won’t be available to consumers until 2013, but the Popcorn Drift® rose is already making a great impression.

The latest addition to the Drift® family recently debuted at the 2012 California Spring Trials, an annual event that brings together breeders, growers, and other horticultural specialists to showcase the finest new plant introductions.

Popcorn Drift® roses will be available in spring 2013.

Watch Bill Mann, President of Star Roses, discuss the characteristics of Popcorn Drift®