What Is A Garden Rose And Does It Matter?

It probably seems all roses are garden roses because where else would you grow them but in your garden!  Guess again.  Some roses are raised specifically for the cut-flower/florist industry and in fact should be never be grown by the casual gardener.  Why?  Because they tend to be disease prone, fussy and require a lot of work.  Sound familiar!

The job of these roses is to put forth blooms on a regular schedule.  When you need 5 million long stem cut roses for Valentine's Day you need predictability and if means you have to spray every day you will.

Consider this fact.  Chemical fungicides and insecticides weren't really put into use until the 1930s and didn't come into their own until the 1950s.  As they became widely available to the home gardener, many of these roses found their way into our gardens.  As the chemicals were slowly banned (hurray!) these same roses acquired the reputation of being hard to grow so many a gardener tore them out or refused to grow them in the first place.

Enter Garden Roses.  Well, not so much as enter as welcome back.  For hundreds and hundreds of years roses were grown without any more fuss than your average azalea.  They were bred and released to the public with the idea they would simply be planted in the garden and admired without the need of a Hazmat Suit. 

Just like Knockout - probably the most popular Garden Rose in United States today.  Here is a little secret.  There are thousands of other great garden roses out there every bit as easy to grow as Knockout.  As we go on I'll help you learn how to find them.

And yes it does matter because anyone can grow them and that is what this Blog and our You Tube project is all about.