On roses and fathers, for Father’s Day

These may not be the hybrids of dad’s day, but they sure bring memories and the garden to life

Have you noticed how spectacular the roses are this year?

Social media has been buzzing with gardeners sharing images of roses, like proud parents showing off snapshots of their children to friends and family. There is a parity to be drawn between roses and children — they both thrive when given a little extra tender loving care.

My father loved to grow roses. In our first home, the backyard included a formal garden area devoted to roses. It was the prettiest yard in the neighbourhood.

Dad was not a rose snob, he filled the beds with bare-root roses from the hardware store, and planted them carefully in a rich, well-tilled garden bed.

In later years, a new house included a rose bed in the front yard filled with some 30 rose bushes. I grew up knowing Mister Lincoln, Chrysler Imperial, Tropicana, Queen Elizabeth, and Peace roses by name — there were many more — all roses named for famous people, cars or places graced our front garden.

Dad loved hybrid tea roses borne on long, single stems. If you’ve ever grown roses, you know what a challenge this can be.

For dad, it was a battle of wits, any roses that reverted to ‘floribundas’ as he called them (more than one bud on a stem) were severely disciplined (pruned) and often ended up in someone else’s garden if they refused to comply to his standards.

To hear him speak, you might think the roses were wilfully producing multiple buds on a single stem just to spite his efforts at having a picture-perfect garden.

Despite the trials, dad was generous with his roses. He would cut a few choice buds and carefully wrap the stems in damp paper towels. Then he would put them in a plastic bag and share them with family, friends and even business clients. Roses were his trademark calling card.

Fast forward to today, and my home garden includes lots of roses, but roses were not my first flowers of choice.

I knew the struggles dad faced with his roses, and the cycles of pruning, feeding and lots of spraying were not for me. My first garden included lots of tea roses, mostly recycled from dad’s garden, after a few years they were replaced with perennials.

In time, I couldn’t resist the Oldenglish roses by David Austin. I started with three toward the middle of the perennial border, along with a few tea roses — the roses would no longer be front and centre in the garden.

When they bloomed, I enjoyed them, and when they took a break or the foliage was marred with disease, I looked the other way. There were other plants to catch my attention.

Thirty years in, I still love my roses. I traded long stemmed tea roses for self-sufficient shrub roses, like Bonica, John Davis and Martin Frobisher in the front border.

I introduced Therese Brugnet and Pink Grootendorst along the back border and they loved the freedom a spacious bed allowed — when they are challenged by weather, or get out of hand, I cut them back very hard and because they are not grafted they come back true to form.

My new latest love is the English rose. They are everything my dad did not like in a rose — multiple buds on one stem — but they’ve definitely won my heart. Today’s English roses combine old-fashioned charm with modern science: most of the flowers include hundreds of petals and are very fragrant, and they are bred to be disease-resistant.

Unlike dad’s tea roses, the Englishstyle roses often have several flowers (six or seven) on one stem. Cut three stems and you have a bouquet with 18 or more flowers. Many of the old English roses only bloomed once per season, but the new varieties often bloom all summer and well into the autumn, as long as the weather holds out.

A quick inventory of my current rose collection finds 21 different roses, not counting the multiples of some of my favourites. The roses in the front garden seem to explode with flowers this month, the ‘Olivia Rose Austin’ rose (by David Austin) with lush creamy pink flowers had at least 100 blooms at one point, and ‘Bonica’ (a shrub rose with smaller, but very prolific flowers) probably doubled that count.

Another beauty, ‘Moonlight in Paris’ a rich apricot bloom with a yellow centre that fades to soft pink graces the garden by the front door. A hybrid tea rose, Moonlight in Paris, conjures up wonderful dreams of travel to a romantic city.

It’s not my father’s hybrid tea rose, it is part of the Clean ‘n’ Easy rose collection that touts disease resistance, bouquet-style blooms and delicious fragrance.

I was so impressed by the performance of this rose, that I added two more Clean ’n’ Easy roses to my collection this year, ‘Winter Sun’ (with soft yellow flowers that age to cream) and ‘Mother of Pearl’ (shades of blush apricot-pink).

If dad were here today, I wonder what he would think of these newfangled roses?

I bet he would appreciate their disease resistance, long season of bloom, and delicious fragrance, but he still might struggle with the multiple blooms and old-fashioned charm I find so endearing.

In any case, he taught me well … the rose didn’t fall far from the bush.