Romantic ROSE GARDEN Tour — Ep. 039

it smells like roses [Music] i would imagine it you start to get accustomed to it after a while i don't think you can ever it's it's true you get accustomed to too redolent [Music] [Music] we'll be here for sunrise then we'll fly [Music] we'll be here for a rainfall and then we're gone [Music] we'll be here for a clear blue sky and then we'll fly this looks like the garden of eden it's a fun place so this is their rosenmeister nursery and uh my nursery is kind of like the story of a hobby run amok yeah what ended up happening was i grew up in an apartment in the bronx and was always into plants house plants and spending lots of spare time at the new york botanic gardens but summertime i'd go up to the catskills to the borscht belt and that's when i got a taste of nature and got into gardening my mother's mother though from trenton had always had roses mostly hybrid teas and when my grandmother died my mom asked if there was anything i wanted from grandma's house and i said a cutting of this one rose it was an old rambler that everyone in the family called grandma's rose yeah and i was not all that interested in roses up to that point but that rose had such memories for me so my mother called up the new york botanic gardens got directions rooted some cuttings and gave me one and it was in keying it out figuring out what rose it was that i kind of got the rose bug it turns out that was an old rambler from dr van fleet wow so i started with one rose 35 40 years ago and got more and more at that point we were living in downtown ithaca in fall creek in a little house with a tiny backyard and you know i started with mostly vegetables but it filled up with roses and then you can't eat roses the hips you can yeah and you can uh use the petals let me just say you can't survive on roses that's right but man does not live by bread alone one does need roses so um it's i guess 19 years ago we bought this land yeah i was looking for land for two years just to find a place to start a nursery for when i retired from teaching and i spent the first year just figuring out how to place the house and it was an abandoned hayfield so you know clearing the land and the creek was all overgrown with multiflora rose and privet so i know how that goes so the first year was just clearing things and then we had the house built and this coming labor day will be 18 years since we moved in at that point everything you see was bulldozed bare ground wow there was nothing here not a tree not a blade of grass and um well just it just is wonderful to hear i don't have actually a personal story with roses like you do so it's really lovely to see how it was something that was so emotionally um that you were so emotionally attached to as a kid and that it took that one rambler to make you do your quote-unquote retirement project which i almost like have to laugh at because it's like oh i'm gonna retire and then really take on this other gig well the first 14 years of the nursery i was teaching full-time and doing this evenings and weekends oh my goodness yeah so is this is this kind of open to the public during certain hours um as a business i'm open on weekends between april 1st and 4th of july from 10 to 4 week days by appointment but it's open all year long if someone gives me a call or stops by and knocks on the door and wants to see it that's amazing well i guess we're gonna go see it firsthand and if you could um yeah take us around and show us some of your roses um why don't we start over at the tea house okay um when i love the idea of a tea house we're even thinking about doing a tea house so when we bought the land my and um my parents saw this my father saw the creek and he said you know you have to build a bridge and have a little tea house across it yeah he always loved japanese gardens and japanese architecture and um around the time uh well a few years after i bought the land he ended up dying of stomach cancer and i went down to help take care of him and one one of the things he said was we never got to build a bridge together no so i that week i went back home and my son came and we built the bridge and the platform and i took pictures of it so my dad could see that and then i finished the the tea house afterwards but you know whenever i sit here i think about him yeah what a wonderful memory so the tea houses um has a roof of clay tiles they're over 100 years old somebody was throwing them out that was before facebook marketplace wasn't yes [Laughter] every time you see something really cool people are like that i got that at facebook marketplace and then you know if you sit here and take a look it lines up with the main axis of the house so this is about one of the only things you'll see in terms of any symmetry but it's this whole asymmetrical balance thing that's going on here right for a hayfield this was really built on a quite a slope i would not want to be cutting hay on this because when i'm mowing just to keep the grass down it's it's challenging yeah now how many different types of roses do you have um currently there's over 200 varieties okay in the past 35 or 40 years i've grown over 500 varieties are there specific ones that you really focus on or is it just whatever you you know speaks to you um originally you know because of that first rose i was hooked on ramblers and they continue to be among my favorites after that i kind of discovered some climbing roses and a family of rose hybridizers the cordis family from germany so i've got a lot of roses from germany and then it was old roses modern roses this morning i was out with a friend rose rustling this time of year i go out to old rural cemeteries and i find abandoned farm sites and discover roses that have been growing untended for you know over a hundred years gather uh pieces of them and identify them and grow them on and try to preserve them last weekend i did a talk out at enfield rural cemetery the christian cemetery there and um i had found four varieties of rose there one of which um nobody i know or i haven't been able to figure out what it is so i'm working on that but one of the roses there dates back to 1520. so it came over with settlers here um when you think about that's that's incredible that's insane that's right what history yeah and there were folks growing in the cemetery what would happen is when folks died they would the family members would take say a piece of rose from that person's garden and plant it by the grave and some of these were way in the back of the cemetery just kind of suckering running wild and most folks didn't even know they were there they were overtaken by blackberries unbelievable so you know there's there's a mix of roses going back the well i don't have it right now but i did have a rose that dated back to the time of the pharaohs um should we go should we go and see some sure yeah so i mean when you look at the trees it's at the stage now where i'm kind of amazed by it all i love that you've lived here for 18 years and you just have this uh childlike wonder still about it because it changes every year and every season i mean i was even shocked looking at some of our gardens from just two weeks ago planting and i was like they're more full now so um if we just step back one thing that you're going to see in terms of geometry is that oftentimes the main features you'll see like there'll be three oaks here they're set like a scalene triangle and what that does is that it draws the eye um and forces you to look into the distance and it's that asymmetrical balance you know the hillside below the house is broader so there's two trees there and just one on the other side of it nice so let's start down the tunnel okay [Music] and how did this come to you over time was did you start with one little area and then just you know begin to the first thing i did was i built the terrace off the south side of the house we had the roses in the wisteria yup um so we'll talk about that when i get up there okay um but i had a picture in my head part of the inspiration came from prince charles's garden at highgrove and um so that was the the picture i had in my head and then it fleshed out from there nice so this is a hundred foot long tunnel of climbers and ramblers i had the arches fabricated at uh weitzman's um this is three acres of land all fenced in there's no way i could grow anything i was gonna say your fence is actually we're looking into an eight-foot fence because our deer are super dear is this is this high enough they can jump it but they don't okay so i hired a mennonite farmer the first spring we were here and these are ten foot posts pounded three to four feet in the ground and then a quarter mile fencing stretched and i hand hammered every damn staple you did it for the roses that's right so i mean when you take a look this is like magic here it is this one is an old one from the 1890s it's a hybrid satijura called irenarong on broad i think we have an iron ringer and i think it's it's that color but it's not a rambler it's a bush and it has really ferocious spines i'm going to have to show you a photo because you're going to have to identify it sure well it's a little tricky identifying because there's um 17 000 roses approximately current in cultivation don't have them all memorized a lot of them oh my god that smells so redolent that is like just pure rose right there yeah that's an amazing rose it's by one of my fav favorite rose hybridizers rudolph geschwind who was an amateur rose hybridizer and forester from some folks say hungary but it was a austro-hungarian empire so germany i really like the mauve colored ones um this is one a lot of folks have it you know or their grandmother's had it's called seven sisters because as it ages you get a range of flowers this is a neat one called city of york um it was brought to this country right after world war one and the name of the rose was uh director benjkopf but because of anti-german sentiment they had to change the name okay this is another fantastic one this is chevy chase it's a rosa suliana hybrid is it based out of maryland it was named after that place yeah now younger folks think jeffy chased so what's neat with the ramblers is that um they're closely related to the species roses so they have various characteristics like the suleiana hybrids have a beautiful grayish green bark i love that you have a little bird's nest i think up in here yeah what a good idea to put your nest in a protected rose bush the one right over here is a real beauty that's um it's very tight it's called pink sarastro that was hybridized in austria and it's a modern repeat blooming rambler that has no thorns except there was a view on the back of the leaf because i was like oh it almost looked like a a wisteria where it's like no thorns at all yeah that's crazy this is another great one this one's called white cap it was hybridized by the brownell family up in rhode island and people thought it was extinct um but then steven scan yellow who was the then director of the rose garden in the brooklyn botanic gardens discovered one plant back in an overgrown section of the garden i was able to get some cuttings and i spoke to steven just this spring and i'm hoping to bring this rose back in the trade wow that's great great to be able to do that and just put it back into cultivation i had corresponded with brownell's granddaughter a few years back she recently died you know just to talk to her about the roses that her grandparents had created yeah how are you doing with the gypsy moths i see one here but they don't seem that interested in your roses um there are a few roses that they've hit it's not too bad yet okay um it seems to be a pretty bad year at least for the trees it's terrible this is uh that geschwind guy i told you about this is another one of his called gershwin stuff which means the most beautiful of gershwin really it seems like to be in peak bloom right now and then behind you this is a wonderful rambler um with an unfortunate name it's called wartburg and it looks like the uh petals were cut with pinking shears this one i had some guy back on because the beast behind us there's a bird in there sorry it's a little cardinal i think [Laughter] um you can see luke fund right behind you this one yeah that one had totally taken this over because this guy was across the arch so i had to super prolific cut this one back i love i love looking at the fresh flowers because it almost reminds me of like egg yolk you know i refer to it as egg yolk yellow oh do you really that's great yeah that's what it reminds me what's neat about this one it's another thornless one he's really going at it what's neat about this rose is typically the scent of roses is carried by oils in the petals but with luke fund and all the rosa helene hybrids that's the species this was bred from the oils are also carried in the pollen so the scent is wind born and you can be at a distance well i mean you stand here and you smell it well i can't really distinguish which one i'm smelling you're kind of in the midst of everything here and if you look at the base of that i took out probably almost a quarter of that this past year because it was getting so big this is five years from a rooted cutting so talk about vigorously i mean and also it just gets that kind of mature bark really like a tree yeah you would expect on a tree like a multi-stem amelie or something like that i don't even know yeah check out the smell of this that color is like it's it's almost fit it's fake yeah you know i think it's spray-painted it's not like my choice of colors but take a sniff raspberry oh my gosh yeah isn't that why i wish you didn't tell me that because like as soon as my nose hit it i was like oh yeah raspberry but i don't know if i would have picked it out if you had said that what's interesting is in rose um in rose sense often times uh they were there's tea there's damask there's musk and myrrh and there's fruit and what happens with fruit scent is that the color of the rose tricks our brain so if it is a yellow or orangey kind of uh color you're like citrus lemon lemon or sometimes peach um but something like this will smell more raspberry it's just kind of like that white wine red wine trick where they're like they they dyed the white wine and people are like red and they say oh yeah this is like a nice deep scent like taste like the red wine but it was white all the time just with food dye with the white roses um oftentimes folks will smell green apple interesting yeah this is a neat rose um it's when it was released way back it's called dr huey it was considered the best red climber back in those days since then what happens is this rose is often used as understock when they graft roses and every year somebody will come by and they say i have a question i have this yellow rose and it's red now how could you does that happen and what happens is roses are often grafted on dr yui and if the top dies back then the rose comes from underneath yeah and dr yui you'll see all over in areas where people had roses growing so what is an undergrad so under stock so the under stock would be the root area um when roses they're we call them grafted but they're really not grafted what happens is you take an existing rose that's really vigorous and you make a little t-slit in the skin and you take one bud you know so right there would be a bud that would be forming but you would do that in the springtime when the bud is swelling and you just take that little bud out you open up that tea slip that bud underneath and wrap it and you let it grow for a year and that bud will send out multiple shoots that next year the existing part of the rose pre-existing part gets cut off that's the under stock with roses it's that you can produce more roses with uh budding because you've got one bud to create many but if i was taking cuttings you know i would use a piece of rose about yay long and even with good conditions you don't get a hundred percent take on cuttings and what are some of the diseases that roses can get um well there's a range of foliar diseases most folks will see black spot or mildew right um one of the ways i have eliminated roses through the years is if there's a rose that gets a foliar disease i shovel prune it you shovel prune it that means from the ground i dig it out and i i toss it so what what i do compost them or do are you afraid that that i don't worry about that but i just i just get rid of them okay so um if it was a really special rose if it gets a foliar disease i won't grow it okay because what i'm known for is disease resistant cold hardy vigorous roses got it with unique characteristics these are stunning this is uh a cordis rose um like that was that uh german family i told you about yeah five generations over 125 years growing roses this is florentina i had always selected for cold hardiness and disease resistance and about five years ago we had a summer of an incredible drought and heat in the 90s there was also one last year that's right yeah so um what happened that summer i started walking around looking at the roses saying okay who is he tolerant and drought resistant right this rose had just been planted the year before and i only provide supplemental watering the first year i plant a rose this rose did not stop blooming through that drought it had flowers from the beginning of june until a hard killing frost it's amazing how you have to go through like these weather swings in order to be able to determine like what is cold hardy because and what is heat tolerant in that range and we'll give you an idea like as the climate warms and everything which ones of these you're going to have you know 10 years from now or 20 years from now yeah this is an interesting one another german one this is from the 80s ramblers tend to be once blooming but there was a hybridizer hetzel who was working on repeat blooming ramblers so i've got a bunch of his this one is super excelsi not much scent but nice color not at all there's like no scent at all and then behind you um that one comes a little later that's super dorothy uh named after dorothy perkins of uh jackson and perkins fame i don't know that jackson and perkins was um well and continues to be a fairly well-known american nursery yeah and it began in newark new york not far from here this one kind of reminds me more like our native roses but with a pink shade yeah this one is um an earlier rose by the cordis family it's called charlotte gloot scarlet glow and when it first opens it's a scarlet red fades to pink it's also raised for the hips it'll make really large rose hips that start green and then turn a golden yellow blush with pink like a pear and then they'll turn scarlet in the fall girl i hear your hips get so big so the other thing that i try to do in the garden when you saw and you looked at the whole property from the tea house is that as you go you get glimpses and um choices where to go it's when folks come here for a tour i almost never do the same thing two days in a row right um sometimes i let the visitor decide which way to go so after you know coming through the tunnel you get this expansive space but then your eye is kind of drawn to the shady area so we could either go up to the top of the hill or check out things down here what are you interested in well i like the little shady area because i just planted a shade garden myself i'm uh i'm acknowledging some of the uh the acers that you have and solomon's seal looks like uh-huh yeah so this place in addition to a lot of roses is like an arboretum almost all in this bed all of the trees are are from asia this one is from korea it's um uh acer shinoshkiyai kurianum is that the one with the red bark um no it has red uh stems really bright red stems and red flowers too um i'll just sorry i'm just going to turn that on the fairies come out so this one you know incredible red the three larger maples here are not in the trade they're from china it's acer mayo tensei a friend of mine was doing some research up at cornell and i got three seedlings wow so they're not commercially available and in fact in china now these trees are endangered wow and do they need to cross pollinate or do they need to they're they're creating fertile seeds so this last year i started to get seedlings from them wow we should probably get one of those seedlings sure we have room for it i mean it has beautiful bark and trunk it's gorgeous and um it looks like a our type of like a red maple as far as the leaf goes it's all it's obviously it's more shallow on the lobes yeah this is another interesting one this one's called white tigress um you see the green and white stripes in the bark striped maple easter pencil pennsylvania orcam or something like that you got it um moosewood moosewood yeah same as our restaurant here in town so um there are a lot of striped bark maples in asia in fact asia has a greater diversity of plants than we do because the glaciers didn't come down through there so this is just you know this has got a much more striking bark than ours definitely yeah this is another really neat maple this is acer uh pelosum sternolobum and it has a fantastic peely bark gorgeous bark isn't that wild yeah and you see some of these you know yeah those this is where this is where i get my glove and i just like knock them off i'm sorry i can't stand those guys so so you'll see benches all over the place and when i do tours folks say oh so do you sit out here in the morning or the afternoon with a cup of tea and what i say is the only time i end up sitting is when i do tours and i say here sit and take a look at the view from here yeah because most of the time i'm working of course of course i always feel like when you're on your own land there's never time to really you know sit and have a think it's always like there's always more to do you want other people to kind of enjoy it it's part of why you do what you do that's in my mind i guess oh for sure yeah so um i had talked about um starting with the terrace up above yeah and uh the terrace connects to this huge stone spiral right behind us did you bring those stones in where did you get those stones i mean i know we have quarries around here but i had two dump truck loads of these brought from north of syracuse it's oh my goodness the tully limestone yeah so um the story behind this would start with the terrace okay when the house was first built and the land was completely bare i had to figure out the dimensions of the terrace and um i'm a nerd in ways beyond plants so i went to um fibonacci yeah fibonacci was a pre-renaissance mathematician who kind of rediscovered the golden ratio of the greeks phi you're speaking saunders language now so um i calculated the height of a house and then using the fibonacci ratio created the depth of the terrace and then from there the spacing from the terrace to the stairs the gaps between the stairs the space on the stairs and the entire layout was based on fibonacci so about five years ago this was just an open green slope i wanted a physical manifestation of the fibonacci ratio so i scribed the fibonacci spiral i had a contractor friend of mine dig this out we ordered the boulders um it was a huge pile and um we lined them up on the driveway this was the first stone we set wow and he and i walked back and forth all day matching one stone with another till we finished the entire spiral and you're like we are one stone short we had exactly the right number there wasn't a stone left over you didn't leave a stone unturned sorry i had you no that's okay cheesy jokes so you know there's this example of fibonacci and then as you come in through that opening yeah you see the terra cotta pineapples yes that's um a roman symbol of welcome they would have that on their houses or entrances to the temples and the spiral pattern in the pineapple is fibonacci sequence so you know i tall there's layers there's layers there's lots of layers here i also appreciate the informality of the garden so you have this kind of structure that you're talking about fibonacci sequence like this kind of perfection of beauty and everything and then you have this wildness this wildness inside the picture frame of you nailed it one of my principles in design is informal planting within a formal structure right i i i resonate with that here's another one of the german roses by cordis this one i think dates back to the 30s isn't that exquisite beautiful there's a famous picture of this rose grown in modest font which is graham stewart thomas's garden and this rose is cascading over the stones into a pool and this was as close as i could come and then there's the louisiana iris in here you know you know i you know what i really appreciate about these tours and and this lee is that i i don't have a relationship with with roses the same way that you did with your grandmother's rose and i'm always like ah roses even the thorny rose bush that we had on our land i was like i'd rather berry bush this should go but after hearing you speak with your passion it's so hard not to appreciate them you know even though i don't have that kind of like you know decades of um of relationships with them so i really i really appreciate it and i really see when you're like isn't this beautiful and i'm like yes i could actually see the beauty it's and all the different shades of its age you know showing yeah what's interesting is when folks come here um most folks have a story an association of a rose with a grandmother invariably this is a neat one this is a german rose a rugosa i'm not going to tell you what it smells like okay good yeah you tell me okay ready it's like wine tasting or something okay i definitely smell i don't want to always say powder that's what it smells like to me okay think of spice i feel like alex trebek now you know we should have that there's a different smell coming it's deeper it's deeper in the rows that's right now when you smell a rose there are three notes like a chord of music the initial and then the mid note and then there's the lingering scent when you really stick your nose in there i don't know what note it is but it's different i don't know clove maybe maybe i don't know clothes smells pretty like you know this you you smell it you give it a shot and get really get your beak in there smells like that smells like roses just cleaning they stuff roses for cleaning stuff it's unfair no but i definitely smell like different nuances of it cloves okay this is the one that smells like little old lady powder to me okay how do you how do you clean your nostrils out before you go on to the next rose well what the uh you're supposed to do is have um some fresh ground coffee yes and smell the ground coffee beans same thing with aromatherapy more powdery to me yeah this one's much more subtle i think i ate a little bit of well this is madame plantain yeah oh she's known for her subtlety oh let's let's just say this how beautiful right i'm going to turn slow motion yeah exactly hold on there's another let me grab for you this is a neat one from holland that dates back to the 1700s sauna this is your neck of the woods this is your family right here that looks like it has multiple heads almost yeah that's called quartering in a rows when there's that many petals so the dutch had come up with this ability to hybridize roses long before anybody else and they kept it as a secret rubbish rub in the dutch the dutch ability to to handle their horticultural roots and in fact that phone call that he came in was from my dutch neighbor afgha oh my goodness and thomas dutch oh then you should so you need to come here for oliboland on new year's holy bullets it's a wonderful um oh like a fritter or doughnut so she makes though yes well uh tamo makes them oh my goodness oh that's good uh-oh i'll i'll hook you up okay it's nice finding other people from your country here so um the spiral starts right in front of that spruce and comes around and then visually if you imagine that line of the stones coming around it's up up and then you see the curve here right and it goes off into space ah amazing i didn't know if i would have i know you mentioned it but i kind of was looking too into the landscape i wasn't casting my gaze outwards as much so you know there's stories with so many of of the trees and roses and perennials that willow is a cutting that i got from a garden friend of mine elizabeth sheldon and she died several years ago she was like the great gardener in the ithaca area had a huge perennial border along the lines of gertrude jico and she had gotten that cutting from eck and winter road these two guys that were amazing gardeners and they've there's lots of garden books written that they've written it's really nice to be able to carry on the legacy of all these folks and i'm just amazed at how you're being you're able to pull on the names of a lot of the breeders of the roses as well which just goes to show you that you're super interested in the history and um and the stories behind every single one of those roses yeah i could tell you the name of every rose every hybrid reviser but um people's names that i just meet it's hard for me there's no velcro with that just teflon i hear you so um if we look at the stairs here if you notice these are yellow brick and where do you what do you associate yellow brick with well dorothy and the wizard of oz and frank baum was from chittenango new york up near syracuse he had come down to ithaca and seen some brick streets that were all yellow and that's where he got the idea oh my goodness so we start the journey at my house coming up the stairs with what the yellow bricks exactly so then we go through the arches here um all these stones are hand cut with a chisel and a hammer they're about two to three inches thick wow and did we already see this rose uh no we didn't this one is white mountains you might confuse it initially with luke fund because it's white and also just the the fact that it seems vigorous yeah yeah this one is from new hampshire university of new hampshire in the 1950s um it's descended from a canadian rambler and it's like zone three hardy i mean imagine a rose hearty to like 40 below zero yeah that's insane so there's little nuances in the design here so if you look at the stones big small small big yep flip-flops alternating the whole way up that asymmetrical balance right by the way this is dorothy perkins hello dorothy of jackson and perkins fame um actually just started here the ramblers usually start a little later so um oh when i first started the nursery i did a lecture on antique roses for the american rose society that was being held in newark new york when i was there i had to go find charles perkins grave and he has dorothy perkins rose carved onto his headstone oh my goodness i have charles perkins humidor um i was a teacher in the school district and the union secretary babysat for charles perkins grandchildren and the american rose society had awarded him this beautiful humidor in walnut with a brass plaque on top and he gave it to her and it was in her garage for years oh my goodness falling apart because it was just aged and a friend of mine refinished the wood and polished the brass and i used it to you yeah and it's my cash box now so dorothy perkins jackson perkins yeah all these stories above your head here is one of the early french ramblers called de la grifforee and she has a wonderful scent darker oh yeah a darker one so the darker ones have a more pungency well what's happening here with some roses as they age they get lighter and some get darker mostly they get lighter that to me still smells like a traditional rose though it's fragrant but it's it doesn't have that raspberry one was the kicker for me because that really did smell like raspberry and then um we move up in here and it's um there are more modern roses um the ramblers were popular from oh the 18 late 1800s to early 1900s and then we move into some more modern roses with just a wild range of color you know when i was first planting things out i was trying to decide you know how do i coordinate colors and all and then i figured to hell with it you know i have a space what rose is next that i can stick in right it worked itself out i think smell this one this is yellow okay so i'm not going to smell citrus i'm not going to smell citrus i'm not damn it i smell the peach actually isn't that wild it's really funny oh man so this is a more modern cordis rose um and this is an oldest older cordis rose what cordis did was he came up with what was almost a new species rosa cordesii and he created a group of roses that didn't get black spot they have this shiny leaf that's like teflon on the leaf the fungus spores cannot get a purchase on the leaf right so that most of the um so like something like this doesn't have that kind of waxy but it has enough that it prevents it interesting so this was you know that's park director riggers that was one of his early ones well relatively early this is a fantastic rose this is another one of those this is my grandson ollie hey ollie do you like roses [Music] it's okay but he helps out a lot around here that's good so um this is by that same guy with the repeat blooming ramblers yeah this one is he was trying to reproduce um an earlier rambler called valshin blau which as this ages it gets that lavender color and this one is called hermann schmidt and he was an architect from zweibrucken where one of the um famous rose gardens is in germany i'm assuming you have gone to germany a lot too only one spot only once my wife was born in germany yeah and she came over as a toddler and hadn't been back in 97 we went with her parents to her hometown yeah um little farm town in the middle of nowhere in the palatinate or the falls between the rhine and bavaria so we went with our parents and um all of our aunts and uncles and cousins are there and we went to zweibrucken because her parents had gone on their first date to zwei brooken and i'm walking around and i don't understand german or speak german i understand yiddish and i can speak a little yiddish um so i'm identifying all these roses and renata has this aunt lisa lotu who's like this brunhilda type yeah and she looks at me and she says darrow's in my stuff which is how the name must have come about that's exactly it it should have probably been derozan maven yeah it doesn't have the same panache yeah i just love seeing all the all the pollinators like they are just ferociously that's the nice thing about the semi-double and the single roses this one is just finishing up bloom this one has an amazing scent you might get it more in uh fresh or blossom this is called paul's himalayan musk maybe my nose has stopped working it happens at a certain point i have i i do you smell much i can get this one a little bit but you know i see yeah it's like i know what they smell like so you have so i go searching for it with my nose right yeah not as not as musky as i uh over here um another cordis rose of course westerland it will smell like sherbet well smell that one and tell me what you smell that actually smells a little fruity to me which fruit i don't know guava no i don't know what did what do people say it smells like a lot of folks will say peaches because of the color i think the yellow was pee more peachy um yeah i do pick up the fruit set oh this one's really that almost like a passion fruit or something yeah yeah so i have loads of pictures of me with my nose in roses two summers ago we went to ireland uh with a bunch of other gardeners from central new york on a tour of old gardens historic sites and natural areas and every time i'd be in a garden i'd be smelling a rose and my wife has like over a dozen pictures of me with my face buried in a rose i'm here breaking my neck [Music] this white one is is a fun one um this comes in a single and a double form sorry i'm not sure if you'll get much from this because it's end of the season that's different so um midsummer's night dream when shakespeare talks about the scent of roses this is the rose he's referring to it actually um smells uh musk yeah this smells much more musky i was going to say like a musky meets pine uh-huh so that's one continue to smell it i stopped smelling it but so that's one of the ashaya ramblers and that's a double form um and i just a friend of mine has a single form that we found on his grandfather's farm up in um king ferry and he's giving me cuttings of that so i'll have the single land double form to grow here nice so it means that there's two types of roses on one plant by double form it refers to the number of petals so single would mean that there are five to seven petals semi-double seven to maybe 15 more than 15. double very double more than 35. it'll look like it'll look like a really ruffled skirt like some of the ones that we've been seeing and then the one that i mentioned that that looks like our native rose is just like a single yeah single petals so um if you notice with those five petals that's the sign of rosacea the rose family almost all are edible fruits are rose family right apples strawberries blackberries so more bricks here these are from the city of ithaca when i first was building this place i sold the city of ithaca 100 roses for a traffic triangle and rather take money i said i wanted brick so they said fine you go pick them and they were in construction debris piles behind wegmans and walmart and i spent the first summer picking brick from dirt and gravel and blacktop and cement somebody did not win out like he first of all he took the rubble he gave the roses but you know there's something about these they're beautiful these bricks are like eight to nine pounds of brick wow and there's probably about eight or ten tons of gravel underneath this and if you notice the stones as you're coming up visually take your eye to who the green man there he is so medieval symbol of nature and wildness and i've got a lot of found objects all over the place so if you take a look at that section of i-beam at the bottom there that was getting thrown out by the engineering school and i joke with folks well i tell them it's my weeding bench i mean everything really comes together and when that's also the beauty of the informality of a garden you could kind of put anything just about anywhere and it will find a place find a place this is a pink wisteria above our head there i get on a ladder four times a year to keep that beast in check but it really responds well to the it does because i get packing i get about three flushes of bloom a year out of it wow now it's traditional in a rose garden for there to be boxwood hedges oh that blue form is yep nigella loving a mist i love and you could use the black seeds in cooking yeah i do so boxwood hedge here feel about boxwood smells like cat piss but you know there's a look that just goes with roses so there's this long narrow one and then behind you there is a broader shorter one yep and then if you take this rectangular solid form and put it on end you could see it even better from the other side it fills in the entrance so you see the rectangular form here vertically and then you come through and then it's horizontal how many green men do you have um two two and then up top here that's russell's cottage rose that's just finishing up bloom i was out rose wrestling this morning and i found a house in brooktondale that has that growing in front um that you ever knock on their door i did today excuse me i just noticed your rose outside so this one um dates back to the 1850s i believe 1850s 1860s it's got over a dozen names it's also called souvenir dubatai du morengo which is a battle that napoleon fought at and i was just telling a a new visitor to the garden about this and a couple days later she sent me a recipe for chicken marango she said i needed to eat that when we appreciate the rose this is a fantastic rose it's one of those roses that i rediscovered because i've got rose friends all over um they let me know what's going on and a friend of mine in syracuse had a friend um who had this rose growing up and covering her garage and she was going to rip it out because it only bloomed once and she's oh i have a friend who would want this so i drove up there i guess it's three years ago and it was like 30 feet long i cut it back dug it up had it in a pot for a year and then planted it out and i've keyed it out and this is turner's crimson rambler this is a rose that was found in japan in the 1800s and brought here then before japan it was grown in china so you know it's one of the oldest multiflora ramblers and the parent of most of the multiflora ramblers wow it also has lots of different names one of the names in japanese translates to 10 sisters because there are maybe like 10 flowers in a cluster yeah and although it only blooms for about five weeks it's magnificent and when folks come to the nursery or i do garden talks um you know everybody wants a rose that's non-stop bloom and what i ask them is well okay how many of you grow lilacs all the hands grow yeah peonies yeah go through the long list how long do they bloom three weeks four weeks peonies what happens about a week they're in bloom and usually when they're in full bloom you get a downpour right and then out of all the plants we have in gardens the only one we expect to bloom all season long are roses and i say why do you expect that from a rose you know and a rose like this in five weeks will produce more flowers in that five weeks than a repeat blooming one will all season long what is it you think about when when when people do say that why why do they expect more from the rose i think we have these associations with roses and everybody loves them so much and they have this vision of cutting roses and putting them on the table and it's so romantic and we always want more yeah and what what's kind of neat is there are times of the year where i look forward to a particular rose there are some roses in the fibonacci spiral that are done by now that will only bloom in may and when they come on i'm down there every day to relish that you know it's like when the first lilacs come on if we had to smell lilacs for six months yeah we'd be sick of that yeah it's true it's true you can't you can't eat all the chocolate cake you know every day oh i think chocolate is another thing okay okay um you know i was just there's another thing i want to show you if we can just go around this way so i was talking about unusual trees um the tall columnar tree is a festive variety of the english stone oak and then to contrast with the vertical element over the arches is a weeping english oak tree that i espaliered wow love the oaks sorry and then you know there's the asymmetrical balance thing the three small boxwoods right the bigger one behind but then you look at the form of the camisiporus in the form of the boxwood same form the one in the distance is smaller to do what create the illusion of more depth i love the weeping oak it's gorgeous yeah so have a seat oh this is a lovely little bench look at this and check out the view and you're under the shade and on the hottest day there's a breeze coming through here [Music] and you know most of the views are not straight on they're all angled views i really feel like as if we came at a good time because we see a lot of roses in bloom but i i get the sense that no matter what time we'd always kind of see something you know things start you know the beginning of may yeah well even before around the going up each side of the stairs with the ramblers there's succession of blooms so there's initially crocus and um then daffodils then uh peonies and iris and it goes on and on and you know the later blooming ramblers are just starting now so i'll have roses in bloom through the middle of july and then they'll take a break in the heat and then the repeat blooming ones will start end of july early august and continue um i've got some roses that will still be making blossoms in november and december well sometimes it it's uh it's quite warm in november and december occasionally and then if you look in that tall columnar spruce i saw i saw one of the roses climbing up there that's an old french rambler called laura davost and um you know i i do that on purpose just i get up on a ladder i didn't get as many of them in there this year i didn't have time but you know folks sit and they look and they say is that a rose tree oh my goodness and now you mentioned that one of the roses uh is hardy up to zone three which is really impressive but where do we really find roses as far as like climates okay climates go yeah so um roses there are between 150 and 250 species of rose depending on whether the scientist group are lumpers or splitters so that's the range and rose species are found only in the northern hemisphere for some reason they did not evolve or grow in the southern hemisphere currently there are roses grown on every continent except antarctica there's a group of canadian hybridizers doing what they call the 48th parallel series and those are roses that can grow up to the arctic circle so they can go to 40 to 50 below zero and i have a couple of them here wow and that's pretty amazing yeah i'd say well this is just phenomenal is it should we go up to the top i thought we could walk around and take a look at the top end of the fibonacci spiral and then do that go up to the pergola at the top of the hill that sounds like a plan oh you have to smell one more okay okay don't tell me though okay this bed is mostly found roses okay so from cemeteries and old houses [Music] all right okay that one's pretty strong okay this one is hard to describe but it's one of the old traditional rose scents i mean it is really perfumey but this is called a damask rose so that would be the damask scent this is the one that adder of rose and rose oil is made from i was going to say it smells like a perfume i mean essentially like that's what they use as the basis for it yeah so this one dates back to um 16 1700s and you found that in a cemetery that a friend of mine had it was passed down in his family his family was originally from england and he gave it to another buddy of mine who lived up in maine so that rose is main hardy this is a great rose i'm sorry you didn't see it in bloom it's a spinosisima from canada um some friends brought it for me um it's called prairie peace and it's covered with peace you know the peace rose with those that peachy blend hundreds of blooms and that looked like it was a prolific bloomer i mean look at how many hair had passed and that's you know like a zone three hearty rose and i think there's there's less than a handful of nurseries in the entire world that have this rose so i'm hoping to put this one in trade this fall and and coming spring so it'll be grown again it was done by an amateur hybridizer from the canadian prairies uh robert erskine who's now dead but you know his roses live on do you ever hunt for ones that you know are not in the trade any longer and just kind of put your feelers out yeah yeah this is a neat one um it's called the katrina rose so katrina right new orleans this rose was growing in a little old lady's backyard in louisiana in new orleans wow and um during katrina she lost her house she lost every tree every plant on her property her property was underwater for like over three weeks and you know what that water was like toxic stuff the water's reseeded and there was no sign of anything growing this rose sprouted from the roots and came back it's a repeat blooming rambler which is unusual it's a thornless rambler they say it's scented i have yet to smell anything see if you get anything from it nothing but nothing it's hardy yeah in central new york yeah so i started this from a cutting um two years ago and this is going to be trained up into the spruce but the katrina rose the resilience of plants and people is it is it named something different or is that just the kind of the moniker that came out of that story they they don't know what it was it's an old rose so it's either called the katrina rose or the peggy martin rose for a famous gardener in new orleans and then you've got some rambling honeysuckles right this is a really neat one here check out that purple yeah is that like velvet fuchsia this is called basies purple and this is another well all of them have stories but what's neat about this this was hybridized by a guy busy down in texas and he was trying to produce heat and drought tolerant thornless roses along the way he came up with basis purple which is thorny as hell and zone four hardy but i love that color and the pollen when it first comes out the pollen is even purple and if you cut the stem the heartwood is purple and it has a really gawky form so i stick it in with other things and that color just glows yeah is it is the pollen enough where you like put your nose in it and you have like a purple stain not quite i wish it would i i see you have your bonsais out yup i i really need a nicer display area for them i could probably use a display area three to four times this big your roses take precedence though they do although i've been doing bonsai long before i was doing roses when i was thinking about a nursery uh for retirement i thought about trees all different kind of things but roses really caught me so this is the okay hello come on you made it congratulations you get a belly bump oh my goodness your heart is thumping uh-oh someone feels left out hello so um it's three acres of land here and uh this is the slope that ollie and i go sledding on every winter we start way at the top we go all the way down here and we make the bend at the bottom sometimes if we build up enough speed and go under the arches into some of those blooming roses in december so my wife is always telling me you have to leave some land open um so the sledding slope in this part of the field is my compromise the top right corner is filled in mostly with ginkgos there's 18 different cultivars of ginkgo oh boy and then in front of it i started a fruit orchard last spring at the beginning of kovid good on you what are you growing what are some of the fruits that you're growing um mostly heirloom apples and pears some bush cherries so the story behind the pergola those side panels are the steel gates from the irish pavilion at the new york world's fair in 1963-64 and i was there by the way you're making them really have to haul you up the hill i've been doing that for a long time so um there's the kite uh yes if you look in the ginkgo oh yeah ollie and my wife got the kite stuck in there a few weeks back i was doing a tour and a woman came by on the tour and she said what kind of clematis is that up there because you know you see purple yeah it's got to be clematis right amazing it doesn't look anything like a flower though it looks like it didn't to me but she was you know she didn't have such good eyesight i guess so anyway 11 years ago they uh well after the world's fair was over the dillinghams um got the steel gates and if you notice there's some holes yeah um there were uh bronze uh sculptures in there so they bought them and donated them to ithaca college the bronze sculptures went into a museum and um ithaca college used them for the gates to the dillingham theater 11 years ago they ended up remodeling the theater and a buddy of mine who was a theater professor there got a hold of the gates i had just scavenged some wrought iron railing um from a bowling alley that was being ripped down i wanted the gates he wanted i wanted the gates he wanted the railing so we swapped oh that's nice i hauled them up here built another platform more gravel more brick hired somebody to weld it this is the spot to sit any time of the year yeah you can see down the valley over 10 miles wow now you could really you really get a sense of the place and i love how the virginia creeper it looks like uh is this one of the trump adventures yeah and then there's roses honeysuckles yeah just a tangle yeah just about everything it's beautiful and a bird's nest i saw that one i don't know if you can see it so in the winter from up here we can see buttermilk falls we can see cornell ithaca college and then just these hills and you can't tell that there's a house across the street or diagonally down there there's a development of probably about 40 or 50 homes wow in the winter time we can see them and it's nice you know but it's also nice this time of year just to have the privacy and make you know this is exactly three miles to the commons but it feels like we're out in the country yeah well you've curated it so well and so beautifully and that the the trees that you selected not only help frame the landscape but create a space for the roses to stand out as well which is so nice and i love the informality of it you know like you said you kind of like have formal border and but have the informality on the inside and uh and i think it just gives it a sense of charm and a sense of character that you just can't achieve when it's so structured you know it's beautiful you got it that's the big idea it's beautiful [Music] you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 312,731

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, upstate New York, summer rayne oakes, outdoor gardening, rose garden, rose garden tour, rose tour, how to grow roses, best roses to grow, roses for Zone 5, roses for Zone 6, roses for Zone 4, roses for Zone 3, hardy roses, cold hardy roses, rose flower garden, rose plant growing tips, rambling roses, rose plant, rose gardens, best rose gardens, rose flower garden tour, rose disease, black spots on rose, der rosenmeister

Id: g5SKH3sF_7c

Length: 69min 10sec (4150 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021