05/13/2009

Fave 5 Heirloom Roses: What They Give You, How You Can Get Them

Writer:

Kurt Knebusch
knebusch.1@osu.edu
330-263-3776

Source:

Kelly King, OARDC, Research Operations
king.1364@osu.edu
330-263-3612

WOOSTER, Ohio — Kelly King, who tends 1,500 heirloom roses as manager of Ohio State University’s Garden of Roses of Legend and Romance, naturally has some favorites.

Here are her top five types, which can be seen at the garden’s free June 13 open house and, as luck and successful plant propagation would have it, also can be bought there:

• Berlin: A “very rare” kind, King says. It has red-orange flowers, a mild fragrance and ruffled petals. It sometimes blooms again later in the summer. It reaches five to six feet.

• New Dawn: “Everybody’s favorite,” she says, thanks to its shade tolerance, disease resistance, glossy dark-green leaves and light-pink summer-long bloom. Its vigorous, arching, climbing growth hits 10-20 feet.

• Rugosa hybrids: They have a strong spicy fragrance, deep-pink/deep-rose flowers, and bright-orange, nearly golfball-sized hips that birds love to eat. Hardy, shade tolerant, and three to eight feet in height, “they need little care and are relatively disease-free,” King says.

• Harison’s Yellow: Its deep-yellow flowers with a mild to strong fragrance are “always the first to bloom,” she notes. It has decorative hips. It’s hardy, shade tolerant, relatively disease-free and easy to care for — light pruning only.

• Rosa wichuraiana, groundcover rose: Petite and manageable at one to two feet, it’s “perfect for a ground cover,” she says, “because it will spread slowly and fill in.” Dainty white flowers.

The garden is part of Ohio State’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster.

The 1,500 specimens there cover three acres, represent 500 different types and will be in full bloom for the open house.

The program, from 9 a.m.-2 p.m., will have guided tours, a 10:30 a.m. talk on sustainable/low-maintenance roses by Don Miller of Mansfield’s Kingwood Center, an “Ask a Rosarian” panel at noon, and a sale of 100-plus heirloom rose plants of 42 varieties, including the five listed here.

All the plants in the sale will have their genetic roots in the garden; all were propagated from plants that are growing there.

Proceeds from the sale will help support the garden.

Get the complete list of sale plants at http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/rosegarden/ (click on “Open House”) or call (330) 263-3612.

OARDC (http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/) is the research arm of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences and is the largest university agbioscience research center in the nation.

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Editor: There are previous press releases about the sale and the open house at http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~news/story.php?id=5172 (May 11) and http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~news/story.php?id=5083 (March 27).