What’s Beautiful Now: Late Summer Roses

Posted in What's Beautiful Now on August 23 2012, by Matt Newman

Stick your head out the window. You don’t have to be full-on family dog weird about it–just poke it out there and see what the weather’s like. Is it a warm day, no sidewalks buried in snow drifts or ice hazard traffic advisories? Then odds are good that the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden should be somewhere in the top three lines of your list of destinations. There are over 4,000 rose specimens in this collection alone, and while spring is the season when visitors are most often scrambling to get a peek (understandably, as roses are like smelling salts after the listless gloom of winter), many people don’t realize that there’s a confetti of colorful rose cultivars blooming at the NYBG for a solid six months out of the year.

Skip over to the Rose Garden right now (while the weather is almost confusingly decent, hence the skipping; I’m talking sit-outside-for-lunch pleasant) and you’ll find the stage set with a show of shrub roses in pinks, whites, and reds. Floribunda, grandiflora, hybrid tea–they’re all there, petaled like petticoats and parasols.

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Admit it: you can’t shrug off that brand of beautiful. But the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is only the first of our collections! Follow the paths a little deeper into the NYBG and you’ll find yourself in the Earth-Kind® Rose Trial beds, where master rosarian Peter Kukielski tends the more hardy and rustic of his cultivars, testing them for the survival instinct lacking in most established varieties. If you’ve ever slogged through the spray regimen of your average, chemically-dependent rose bush, this program is an undertaking you’ll want to keep squarely on your dashboard.

Want to see what else is scintillating in the Garden for the coming weeks? Look no further than Plant Talk. I’ll be keeping you up to date as we run out the clock on summer’s flowers.