CHAMBERSVILLE, Texas – Texas has
had a prominent role in the quest for saving old roses. The practice of
organized rose rustling started here about 30 years ago. Rose hobbyists,
including several from the Dallas area, met to canvass small-town gardens and
lonely country roads in search of old roses that looked like they had weathered
decades of neglect, yet survived to bloom abundantly. They took cuttings from
the rose bushes (asking permission first, if the locale was inhabited), rooted
them, planted them in their own gardens and shared rooted cuttings with others.
Although many heirloom roses have
returned to the nursery trade, few gardeners know they are organized into 13
types, with varying growing habits. That's one reason a group of North Texas
rose enthusiasts and Stephen Scanniello, president of the Heritage Rose
Foundation, hatched a plan to create a vast study garden planted with Chinas,
teas, hybrid musks, noisettes and ramblers. Plant them and let them grow to
their full potential. The study garden would be a resource not only for
old-rose specialists but also for gardeners who want to choose the right rose
for the right place.
"One of the goals of the
Heritage Rose Foundation is to ensure the preservation of heritage roses and to
teach what are the right roses to grow," says Mr. Scanniello, who lives in
New Jersey. "We decided to collect roses suitable for your climate, and
show them in the ideal conditions under minimal care. That's a very unique
approach."
Nine years ago, Claude Graves, an
"obsessive-compulsive" Richardson rosarian and active member of HRF,
toured a rose garden in France laid out around the periphery of a golf course.
"They just let them get as big
as they wanted to get," he recalls. "I like that concept of
displaying the old garden roses in their full glory. Not pruning them, not
forcing them into a size that's really too small for their natural habit."
That aspect stayed with him and was
rejuvenated several years later when a fellow rosarian, Dean Oswald of Plano,
asked for Mr. Graves' advice about planting old roses to beautify a young tree
farm he was developing in Chambersville, Texas, about 10 miles north of
McKinney. He was entranced, he says, with the romantic notion of planting
ramblers to scramble over a rusty old tractor near the farm's entrance.
When Mr. Graves visited the rural
acreage, a rolling pastureland that dates back to 1847, with windbreaks of
native trees, a creek and ponds, that memory of the French golf course
surfaced. Instead of planting the one rambler, Mr. Graves asked, what about
setting aside space to plant 300 roses?
Photo by NATALIE CAUDILL/DMN
Heirloom roses signify the entrance to the
Chambersville Heritage Rose Garden, open on spring and fall weekends.
"I like roses. I think this is
a very worthwhile thing to do," says Mr. Oswald, explaining why he agreed
to the plan. "And, it will increase traffic to the tree farm."
Mr. Oswald, who grew up in Oak
Cliff and ran a family manufacturing business that supplied military contracts
– until the end of the Cold War diminished the need for his services – started
the tree farm as a second career. A strawberry blond, Mr. Oswald's face is
sun-baked, a clue that this is a man of action and not someone who sits behind
a desk.
"Claude and I are
collaborators. Claude is the spirit and soul. I am simply the
implementer."
In the middle of the summer in '05,
Mr. Oswald plowed the soil where the study garden was to be installed, added
compost and expanded shale to improve the soil, sited the spot for each rose
and drilled planting holes and laid an irrigation system that would feed and
water each bush.
"It was 104 degrees the first
weekend we planted and 100 degrees the next."
The roses are not sprayed for
diseases, nor are they cut back to force them into a certain size. They are
heavily mulched (about 6 inches deep) with finely shredded cedar. The tree farm
is managed by Mr. Oswald's son-in-law, Chad Simmons, who insists on organic
practices. Organic fertilizer is pumped through the irrigation system as well
as molasses to feed beneficial bacteria in the soil and another extract to
sustain beneficial soil fungi. A foliar feed of compost tea is next on the
schedule.
In spite of North Texas' notorious
propensity for besieging roses with blackspot and powdery mildew, there is very
little evidence of it in the Chambersville garden. With tea roses, for instance,
planted on 20-foot centers, the bushes enjoy optimum air circulation. Feeding
the soil as well as the plants also help the heirloom roses fight off disease.
"We've got to provide a place
for people to see what these roses can do if left alone to do what they
do," says Mr. Oswald. "That's why they are planted so spaciously.
These babies," pointing to the tea roses, "will grow to their
magnificence."
Now that the roses are established,
the garden is ready for visitors. Volunteers from North Texas' rose societies
have scheduled work days there to weed and prune out old growth about every
other year. When the roses are in full flower the same groups stage picnics for
members.
The garden is open on spring and
fall weekends to the public and so is the tree farm. Mr. Oswald has added old
garden roses, EarthKind roses, Griffith Buck roses (developed in the middle of
the last century for Midwest gardens and their colder winters) and even a few
new roses to his inventory of oaks, Japanese maples, crape myrtles, cedar elms,
magnolias and other landscape trees suitable for North Texas.
Open Garden
The Chambersville Heritage Rose
Garden is open on weekends in spring and fall from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. For
directions, go to www .chambersvilletreefarms.com
or call 214-295-1058 .