Roses without chemicals

Whether you are a home gardener or the steward of a public rose garden anywhere in the world, I want you to have the confidence to grow roses, or to grow roses again, without chemicals. That’s my dream and that’s why I wrote this book. By the time you have finished reading, I hope you will feel free to grow a huge variety of these spectacular plants. Because nearly everyone has heard the phrase “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” I often quote it when talking with people in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, where I was the curator for eight growing seasons. These words come from the 1913 Gertrude Stein poem Sacred Emily, and people have taken the line to mean something like “Things are what they are.” Ironically, the rose was a very bad example for Stein to use for her metaphor. Taken as commonly understood, the sentence would mean that all roses are basically the same, and no matter which pretty picture you see in a rose catalog, the plants are all going to grow the same, smell the same, and perform the same. Stein would have been more on target if she had written, “Rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose is (not) a rose.” That’s because all roses are not created equal. Or, more importantly, all roses are not created for the same purpose.