A New Path For Rose Growers

Sarah Owens, the curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Cranford Rose Garden, was the guest speaker at the Southampton Rose Society’s annual luncheon, held this year at the Meadow Club in Southampton last month. Her experience is of particular interest to the members of the society, as they are presently working to create an organic rose garden at the Southampton Cultural Center.

Ms. Owens, who was welcomed by Southampton Rose Society President Hal Goldberg, took charge of the Cranford Rose Garden in 2009. The daughter of avid rose gardeners, Ms. Owens remembers her parents spending their weekends in the garden, spraying and fertilizing. But roses didn’t interest her then; that came later.

Ms. Owens got her undergraduate degree in studio arts and became a sculptor, creating ceramic pieces based on natural forms. But, she said, she wanted to find a field where she could have a full-time job. She settled on horticulture and attended the New York Botanical Garden’s program in professional horticulture.

In 2007 she worked with the Botanical Garden’s famed curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, Peter Kurielski. It was then that roses cast their spell on her. She discovered species roses and heritage and old garden roses that were very different from the pampered hybrid teas in her mother’s garden.

During an internship in the Battery Conservancy Gardens of Remembrance in lower Manhattan, designed by renowned landscape architect Piet Outdoulf, Ms. Owens learned how to work with low-maintenance perennials. It was then that she also learned to garden organically.

After graduation, Ms. Owens became head gardener at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in upper Manhattan, where she gained an understanding of combining annuals and perennials in cottage-style gardens. All of her garden experiences have come together to inform her work at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When she took over in 2009, that historic collection had been without a curator for a year. The workload was daunting, but Ms. Owens said she was up for the challenge.

The Cranford Rose Garden is one of the largest collections of roses in North America. It is home to thousands of roses—hybrid teas, of course, grandifloras and floribundas, but also species roses, mosses, rugosas and many other old garden roses. Climbing and rambler roses, many of them heritage varieties, form a large part of the collection.

The garden also includes many “found” roses propagated from neglected plants discovered thriving in abandoned homesteads and other untended places. Intrepid seekers called “rose rustlers” travel the country in search of these hardy roses and what they might teach modern growers.

Ms. Owens came to the Cranford with a mission to maintain the garden in a sustainable organic way. Given that roses are susceptible to a legion of pests and diseases, growing them organically is a complex and challenging proposition. Early in her tenure in Brooklyn. Ms. Owens faced an even more daunting problem. The garden was struck by rose rosette disease, a fatal infection spread by mites. The climbers and ramblers in the Cranford Garden were especially hard hit.

During the winter of 2009 and 2010, she embarked on a major renovation of the garden. Many roses were removed, and some were replaced with more disease-resistant varieties. Parts of the garden were regraded and the transition toward organic sustainability began.

First, Ms. Owens amended the soil with lots of organic matter in the form of compost. Good soil, she said, is the real key to success in any garden. Next, she began to introduce perennials as companion plants for the roses, so the roses could become part of a mixed garden rather than a monoculture. She hoped the bushy companion plants would attract and support beneficial predatory insects that would prey on the disease-carrying mites and other pests.

Today, this strategy is working and the garden has become a haven for such beneficial insects as lady beetles (ladybugs) and their larvae, which are voracious consumers of aphids and other pests.

Maintaining the garden long-term was the next great test, especially in light of budgetary limitations. But Ms. Owens said she was determined to rely on organic soil amendments and fertilizers.

The rose garden receives additions of mushroom compost (a by-product of commercial mushroom farms), corn gluten meal, Greensand, blood meal and bone meal. In spring, the garden is fertilized with a commercial-blended organic rose food. A layer of mulch on the soil surface reduces weed growth.

Another component of the organic program at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has been the usage of organic sprays on a rotating basis so pests don’t become resistant to any of them. The arsenal includes potassium carbonate, neem oil,

bacillus subtilis

(a bacterium that protects plants against pathogens) and spinosad (another helpful bacterium effective against insect pests).

But because even organic sprays kill beneficial insects as well as pests, Ms. Owens said that her goal is to eliminate all spraying and create a thriving ecosystem in which good nutrition and beneficial insects allow plants to flourish and keep pests at bay. Another recent step in that direction was this year’s introduction of spraying compost tea and fish emulsion. These products deposit nutrients and beneficial microbes onto plant leaves as well as into the soil.

Mr. Goldberg said that creating an organic rose garden on the East End will be a learning process. During the talk, he reported that he planted an organic rose garden at his home this year, which has been a formidable, but worthwhile, challenge.

“There were moments of frustration,” he said, adding that there have also been rewards. He went on to say that organic is the way to go in gardens, lawns and landscapes, particularly here on the East End where our waterways have become increasingly damaged by pollution.

The new rose garden at the Southampton Cultural Center, set to open in 2013, will herald a new era in rose gardening on the East End, Mr. Goldberg predicted. And the benefit for the home gardener will surely be the availability of a larger selection of tough, disease-resistant roses for their own gardens.