Now's the time!
The popularity of roses in containers in garden centres is undermining the traditional market for bare root roses: a pity, since planting bare roots roses during their period of dormancy remains the most reliable way to ensure proper growth.
Collected in the fall and stored in a cold room, young bare root roses are light, easy to pack, and inexpensive to transport. Thus, the rose grower's production of the year, listed in his catalog with its batch of novelties, once found its main outlet during the off-season. And roses planted in soils, where even in the southernmost regions good humidity is guaranteed, had no difficulty in establishing themselves, the rooting being stimulated by a good praline of the roots.
As spring approached, the remaining roses were wrapped in a net in some compost or repotted for distribution to markets and spring plant festivals.
Today, the rose has lost none of its appeal, but many gardeners no longer know how to trust a description in a catalog, an illustration on a website to guide them in the winter setting up of a border. Garden centers have largely contributed over the last thirty years to the distribution - against the timing of their traditional planting - of partially or fully flowered roses, kept for a few months in containers. Their successhas gradually shifted the entire rose market, whose sale is increasingly late in the season. By the time of Journées de la Rose at Chaalis Abbey in June, there should normally not be a single viable rose for sale. However, many producers and all the numerous rose merchants offer stalls overflowing with color, with fully-flowered roses, to visitors who are not always aware of the plant's unique biology. Weaned in full summer of their supply of fertilizers diluted in the irrigation water, transplanted from a bed of light compost to the full ground of a garden having to undergo periods of summer drought, the roses do not remain in bloom long time. At best, they will adapt to their new habitat during their summer dormancy, blooming weakly the following fall. At worst, they will not recover from a too abrupt transition between their industrial production and the reality of a garden.
And what had become a useful means of extending the operating season of an annual production of roses thus becomes a necessary step for rose growers, with an inflation of production costs (potting, soil, fertilizer, watering) and transport, which cannot always be easily reflected in the selling price.
Let's plant rose s
If you like roses, this is the ideal period to rediscover the classics of old roses, the great successes of the modern rose, the novelties of French hybridizers and the somptuous English roses. After a fairly dramatic year for growers, rose growers find themselves with a lot of new products that could not be sold because of the mainy canceled plant festivals. Ordering bare root roses from the beginning of November until March-April will certainly be a way to help them cross a delicate course.
Order your bare root roses directly from all the passionate French hybridizers and rose growers that we have met through the pages of L'Art des Jardins: Jean-Lin Lebrun de Mela Rosa, Fabien Ducher , Michel Adam et Dominique Massad chez Pétales de Rose ou les Roses de la Côte d'Emeraude, Bernadette Bonnefoy de la pépinière Les Rosiers des Merles, Edith Brochet-Lanvin à la Pépinière de la Presle, Yan Surguet des Roses anciennes de Talos, Jérôme Rateau des Roses anciennes André Eve, Jérôme Chéné des Roses Loubert, Dominique Croix et Jacques Ranchon des pépinières Paul Croix , Francia Thauvin and many others ... without forgetting the specialists in your region or country.
And don't forget that a garden rose will be a perfect gift that will last, and that most good rose growers can provide you with a bare root rose potted for the occasion. parties, easier to present under the tree.
Photo : Philippe Loison - Marianne Lavillonnière © Lagor Garden