June 30, 2016
Chasing Colour
Copyright Bob Osborne
One of the greatest joys of being a nurseryman is seeing a new plant bloom for the first time. This year is a banner year for such pleasures.
Coming around the corner of the garden, I was made speechless by a single peony flower. I like red peonies well enough, but this was a stupendous red. While most red peonies have a different colour within the flower, this cultivar was a pure, glowing deep red. The entire flower, petals and petaloids (the smaller central structures) were the same shade. Needless to say, I called everyone over to see this new addition. Its name is ‘Red Charm’, but it is beyond charming.
New colours are constantly being introduced in peonies. Yellow was a very rare colour in the herbaceous peonies, which most of us grow, but a true yellow petaled peony did not exist until breeders crossed it with the tree peony. Now we can grow immense golden flowers or white and purple beauties.
This is rose season. I have a colleague in Alberta who has taken upon herself the task of collecting every old heritage Canadian rose she can find. She is the daughter of a rose breeder and when he died she felt compelled to assemble all his selections. Soon, however, she was traveling the West in search of roses bred by all the prairie breeders. Often she is beating her way through the dense brush of an abandoned nursery to find the last existing shoot of some rarity. She collects cuttings from every find and ships them to me by courier to be rooted. The collection has now become quite staggering.
For the last few years we have examined these bushes and their flowers looking for those that we think are worthy of future production. Many are singles or near singles. While there is a market for such roses, it seems most rose fanciers are looking for those with many petals.
Recurring bloom is another pre-requisite for most modern roses. Re-blooming has nothing to do with beauty but most of the older roses have a single bloom season and this limits the market for them. It is a shame more people don’t grow the one time bloomers, as they are often some of the most spectacular and fragrant of all. Besides which, a single season rose blooms two to three times as long as any other shrub.
Colour is always a factor when choosing roses to propagate. Pink is the most common colour in roses, but there are endless shades of pink-soft pink, bright pink, salmon pink, coral pink, the list goes on. Just when you think you’ve seen them all, a new shade arrives. Finding those new shades is part of the job.
One of the most difficult colours to find in hardy roses has been yellow. Though many breeders have strived to create a great yellow, the successes have been few. We get to see the newest selections from places like Vineland Research Station in Ontario where they are breeding for disease resistance, hardiness and new colours. The quest for a great yellow or orange or peach continues.
Red roses, likewise, come in various shades. There are a few here that re-define true red. One has thick textured petals that resemble red velvet. Some of the newer reds are more double or have contrasting bands of yellow or orange.
Not all the new plants are from well-known species. As an example, we have a perennial called Astrantia. A new cultivar to us has fascinating magenta blooms that have caught our attention. Another low perennial called Anchusa ‘Loddon Royalist’ is a blue as deep as can be imagined.
It’s not all about the flowers either. This year we have begun growing a smoke bush called ‘Golden Spirit’. Unlike the more common green and purple leaved smoke bushes, this one’s foliage is a glowing chartreuse yellow. It draws you like a bee to honey.
There is still lots of growing season to come and, no doubt, more treasures will reveal themselves. It’s a tough job keeping track of these plants, but someone has to do it.