Star Gardener: Roses for the 21st Century

&Nbsp;   Progress in breeding has gone at warp speed and today there are literally dozens of roses of unutterable beauty that meet the no-maintenance requirements of the 21st century. The best are also self-cleaning so deadheading isn’t necessary, and fragrance is once again being bred back into the rose. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not.     I spent last Wednesday, the hottest day of the year thus far, at the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden selecting my favorites from the more than 600 new varieties that have been planted there since 2007. That was when New York City banned the use of the pesticides needed for roses on city property, including NYBG.     After a lecture at the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons last fall by Peter Kukielski, curator of the garden, he provided me with a list of the top 115 performers at the garden during 2010. (That list is now posted on the NYBG Web site.) I studied the list, cross-referencing descriptions and photographs from growers. Most of the plants are not yet available commercially in the United States. Mr. Kukielski hopes that U.S. propagators will begin to offer them if the plants receive enough favorable attention.     Calista Washburn and I selected nine of our favorites in a range of colors including climbers, shrubs, floribundas, and even a lavender hybrid tea, and imported them from Canada. We thought if Mr. Kukielski could put his high-profile job and reputation on the line, we couldn’t go wrong. We sold more than 100 plants for the Garden Club of East Hampton, many more than we had anticipated. The moral: People love roses and want to grow them if it doesn’t involve high maintenance and heavy-duty spraying.     Shrub roses are particularly adaptable for today’s informal gardens: They integrate nicely in mixed or perennial borders, or they can be grown as specimens on their own. Cinderella has large soft pink fragrant flowers with the cupped shape of old garden roses. It can be grown as a bush or even trained as a climber. It more than lived up to its expectations, and my notes show it captured my attention and fancy at two different times during the day.

A Snowball Bush by Any Other Name… « Bluestone Garden Blog

It’s easy to run into problems when you’re trying to identify a plant using a common name, rather than its Latin designation. Here’s one such dilemma: just about any shrub at all with big, round, fluffy, white flowers can ostensibly be called a “snowball bush.”

At one time, I had a snowball bush of my own. Like many snowball bushes, it belonged to the viburnum genus – and its proper name ( Viburnum plicatum ‘Kern’s Pink’) was quite a mouthful. Even its common name (pink snowball viburnum) was problematic though, because the round blossoms opened to snowy white, not the rosy hue that its moniker suggested (the buds may have had a faint pink blush to them). The shrub had actually been given to me by a nursery manager who was desperately trying to eliminate ‘Kern’s Pink’ from his stock, because he was tired of customers trying to return the bushes when they failed to produce pink flowers.

Recently I was taking pictures of this absolutely gigantic snowball bush in my neighborhood, when the shrub’s owner came out of the house to chat. The photo is below — it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?

While I had assumed that this 20-foot tower of snowy blossoms was also a viburnum, she informed me it was a pee-gee hydrangea ( Hydrangea paniculata ), planted by her dad more than 30 years ago. And while I listened politely, this didn’t seem right to me – it was far too early in the year for hydrangeas to be blooming, for one thing.

So I did a little investigating on the Internet and talked to a friend who’s an expert at plant identification. The pee-gee hydrangea, wouldn’t you know it, is also sometimes called a snowball bush – it’s very similar to the large, blue mophead hydrangeas that you see everywhere in June, but with creamy white blooms.

The towering snowball bush in my neighborhood, however, was almost certainly Viburnum macrocephalum , the Chinese snowball bush. It’s the only one of the white-flowered wonders with the ubiquitous “snowball” moniker that is likely to reach a height of 20 feet. The flowers themselves are also huge, starting out lime-green before they turn to white. Unlike many other types of viburnums, they have no scent at all – and they’re sterile, so you won’t get the brilliant red berries that viburnums are known for either. It hardy matters, though, when the spring display is this spectacular.