Passion and poison: the thorn in the rose

What can enclose
this ample innerness?
So soft is this touch,
it could soothe any wound.
~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~

I may belong to one of the smallest groups in history — people who are conflicted about roses. It’s not that I don’t love the look of many, or their subtle variations of color and intricacies of form. Or the voluptuous softness of their petals. The way they hold light in their layered bowls. The deep, complex, sensuous perfume of those with scents. 

I love the native, simpler, wilder roses that edge the woods, climb mountains, thrive on coasts, and survive arctic winters. With fossils dating back at least 40 million years, the wild ones are the ancestors of all the roses in our gardens.

In all this, I join an endless line of rose lovers, the first long lost in antiquity. Presumably, our forebears enjoyed the same things we do: their beauty, their scent, their touch. Perhaps their use as food or medicine. Their hips, the fruit following the flower, are very high in vitamin C and bioflavonoids.

Only when they settled into houses 10,000 years ago could our ancestors think about growing roses for the pleasure of it. Along with discovering ways to produce stronger plants for crops, they learned to breed preferred characteristics into roses. 

Thus, by 300 BCE, the Greek writer Theophrastus, in listing all known varieties, included some with a hundred petals per flower. Confucius, writing around 500 BCE, noted that there were many varieties growing in the imperial gardens. The emperor’s library had hundreds of books about roses in it.

In the 18th century, roses from China were crossbred with those from Europe, creating larger flowers and longer bloom times. The descendants of that marriage make up most of today’s cultivated roses.

Despite my appreciation for their beauty, I am deeply aware of the thorn in all of this hybridization. It has created a lot of needy plants. The hardiness of the wild ones is long gone from their cousins. Those are undoubtedly beautiful, with more complex flowers and, for some, the ability to bloom all season.

But they need crutches like pesticides and fungicides to prosper under many gardening conditions. And a lot of both. I once heard a man with a famous rose garden describe the weekly spraying and soil drenching needed to keep it going.

He lived above an aquifer that is the only source of drinking water in his area. But he was advocating routinely soaking the ground with poison to support his passion.

He was not remotely an evil man. He was in love with roses, and willing to do what it took to keep them beautiful in a damp climate. This is one of our complex human challenges. Reconciling the desire for beauty, or at least a certain type of beauty, with what it takes to obtain it.

It’s not new. The ancient Romans loved roses so much they insisted the peasants grow less food to make more land available for them. Today, vast farms in Ecuador and Colombia provide 1.5 billion roses annually for the US florist trade. As they do, they destroy the health of their farmworkers and poison the rivers that irrigate peasant farms downstream.

Hybridizers work tirelessly to come up with vigorous plants that provide us with what we want without being propped up by chemicals. It’s a slow process, but shrub roses, in particular, have made progress toward fungal resistance.

Then, in 2000, Will Radler, an amateur hybridizer in Wisconsin, launched Knock Out roses. They were among the few roses I was happy to use as a landscape designer. At the end of a muggy Long Island summer, they were as green and vibrant as they were at the beginning. That was unheard of with other cultivars until they came along.

Since I like the look of the simpler wild roses, I like Knock Outs. Apparently, others are also willing to forego the lush look of the exquisite roses pictured here from Manito Garden in Spokane, Washington. Knock Outs are now the best-selling roses in the country.

It’s possible to grow roses organically. That’s how everything was grown until a few decades ago. One way to start is to choose plants strategically. In much drier California, friends are mystified when I talk about fungal problems. They have many more options for growing roses than does an east coaster who doesn’t want to spray fungicides.

From there, the usual organic practices apply. Create rich soil, irrigate efficiently, use biological controls when needed. It’s not complicated or arduous. Nor is it complicated to buy organic cut flowers from easy-to-find suppliers like Organic Bouquet or members of Fair Trade USA.

Despite its exponential growth in recent years, organic production is not scaled to meet our massive demand for either flowers or food. Nor is the mindset there. Or the willingness to pay any extra cost upfront, at the store, rather than have it buried in unintended consequences.

Organic gardening and agriculture are not simply lists of alternative steps to take. They are a way of thinking, a different relationship to Earth, to soil, to water, to insects and animals, to our fellow human beings.

They are sympathy for workers and concern for children. Understanding that bees are just as much a part of the cycle of life as we are. It’s the realization that three things keep us going on Earth — air, water, soil — and degrading them is deadly to all life.

This is a vast topic, and it may seem unfair to pile it on roses’ soft petals. But people often wonder what they can do to help heal the environment, given the damage done. Supporting organic production is something that can be done every single day. In our own gardens, and with every dollar spent on organic food or flowers.

As small an action as it seems, it’s dismantling the poisonous idea that it’s okay to do whatever we want with Earth. Or to ask certain people to face more of a toxic burden than we ourselves are willing to bear. It’s acknowledging that we are not in charge of Earth. That we are one part of — and utterly dependent on — the richly varied life our planet supports.

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