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Roses Made Easy
Roses are...
Clockwise, from top left: Pink Double
Knock Out; Knock Out; Rainbow
Knock Out; Pink Knock Out;
Double Knock Out; Blushing Knock Out
(Originally Published May/June 2007)
Last year, I gave away a wonderful door prize at a garden lecture: a bare-root, award-winning Rainbow Knock Out rose that wasn't available to most gardeners until this year.
The winner was terrified. I understood her fear. Roses used to be synonymous with high maintenance.
But while Midwesterners still need to coddle some types of roses, recent advances in shrub roses (also called landscape roses), have changed everything. Now, anyone can grow roses.
"They're as easy to grow as spirea, and they bloom all summer long," says Peggy Anne Montgomery, a horticulturist with Bailey Nurseries in Saint Paul, one of the country's leading developers of new roses.
William J. "Bill" Radler of Milwaukee was specifically seeking a rose that needed less care when he created the Knock Out rose. Since its introduction in 2000, it has become the best-selling rose in the world—more than 4 million were sold in 2006, with good reason.
