MinxterBLOOM

at Retrorenovation, the fab blog space by Pam Kueber.  My first post is a treatise on hybrid tea roses, one iconc fixture in mid-century "modest" years.Click to visit Pickering Nursery

Here is the intro:

1996, Somewhere in Suburban Maryland: During the home inspection before we settled on the old brick, center-hall colonial house on a street named for a tree, I stood before three raggedy roses: These sorry but earnest plants grew in the front bed under the right hand window.  “Will have to call gran-paw and ask about helping these sad roses.”  The roses were inter-planted between what I later determined were forsythia bushes.  So squared-off by an electric pruning sheers these forsythia were that they did not bloom until two years later after I let them grow.  The electric sheers were left in the garage, an oversight or parting gift?  I do not know.  I still sometimes mutter, Clue-style, “Professor M. In the front yard. With the electric sheers.”

The previous owners did take the three roses — roots and all — early in the morning before we moved in.  A new neighbor, with a perfectly coiffed yard, tasteful foundation plantings, and a perfectly placed climbing rose over her side porch said that the roses were sentimental to the family. Should I be miffed? I thought.  Nah.  The bushes looked straggly and squeezed at the front of the house.  Besides, the deep red and dark pink tones did not show up against the red brick.

A few weeks later, in the soil I found two metal tags: one read ‘Tropicana’ with the other tag sporting ‘Chrysler Imperial.’  I now knew the names of two of the rose bushes.  “Hybrid tea roses, from the fifties,” replied my grandfather when I asked him. “Nice enough blooms, but no scent.  Wouldn’t grow them again if I were you.  Fussy roses, need fumigation to fight black spot; both cultivars are from the 50s, I think.”  Black spot sounds icky; Fumigation, worse, I though.

Tasteful-foundation-plantings neighbor later told me that Professor M and his wife could not bear to leave the roses because they honored the births of their three children.  I still wonder what that third rose was named.  And, I watch for the missing metal tag more than ten years later. Roses are tagged at the grower, with the quarter-sized disc placed between the main stem and the roots.  Look for them at the base of existing roses.  Tags are increasingly made of plastic, though, sad to say.  But if you find a metal tag while puttering in the yard, you may have clues to the rose choices of previous owners.