Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I want to talk to you about
roses that are in trouble. I talked about this before but today i want to start with this
guy right behind me here which doesn't look like much right now kind of a shrubby scrubby
sprawling thing but in the early spring it loads down with these beautiful nicely scented purple
flowers that just make those stems arch in the most beautiful way i'm inserting some pictures
right now this is called 'Robert le Diable' and it's pretty hard to find on the market
last year however i was able to propagate 24 of these roses and send them out through the mail
to gardeners across Canada and here for local sale on the farm and so now many more of these are in
the trade that's been kind of my mission i talk a lot on this channel about "How to" but this goes
into the "Why to": why did i get into the business and why do i want to propagate roses
'Robert le Diable' is one of those examples but i have others 'Stanwell Perpetual' is a scots
rose some people call them scotch roses but i call them scots because it's not a whiskey the
Stanwell Perpetual is a beautiful rose with a light pink color looks delicate but is super
tough and vigorous and hearty to to cold climates again not that commonly offered on the market a
little hard to propagate the financial incentive is not there to continue propagating it in large
numbers because it's out of patent you can't earn that much money from it so here i am i'm
keeping it in the market last year i was able to do oh something like 10 of those and again
ship them out to alberta and so on and also sell it on local sale so let's talk for a minute about
why some of these older out-of-trade out-of-patent varieties are endangered in people's gardens
some of the newer rose suppliers or any rose supplier at all really commercially wants to make
the most money they can i made a whole video about this a while back called roses are in trouble
it goes into the demographic and industry changes that have made these roses at risk i'll give
you the example of David Austin Roses in England obviously their financial interest is very tightly
attached to the newest roses the ones that are in patent protected nobody else can propagate them
so basically once a rose goes past 20 years old they don't have that much interest in it they may
keep it in the catalog for a few years until they have a replacement but they really don't have an
interest in keeping them on on the market there's an older rose called 'Radio Times' that i got a
cutting of recently beautiful rose everything i can see i haven't seen it bloom in my garden yet
but everything i can see online is that this is a gorgeous rose with a kind of a terrible name but
wonderful rose and again it's kind of hard to find in the trade now but again i've propagated it now
i'll have a mother plant i'll be selling those on the local market or trading those with other
rose growers so again those older out of patent roses that's why they're at risk right now let's
just assume for a moment that you are convinced and you want to take personal action on preserving
out-of-trade garden roses what can you do and i take this down to individual action because
i think individual is the only sensible unit for moral action in the universe i say that in a very
sweeping way but too many people look around and say well why don't the rose societies do something
about it or why don't the companies do something about it no it really comes down to as an
individual gardener there's things that you can do to get these roses into your garden and preserve
them so number one in that would be of course to educate yourself about the different kinds of
roses there's probably a whole world of roses out there that you don't know about and that if you
learned a little bit about them maybe you'd have an interest in putting them into your garden uh
the Bourbon roses the Scots roses the Portland roses there's a whole bunch of roses throughout
history that now have fallen out of the trade more or less uh hanging on by a threat in people's
gardens that if you read the bite book you might get inspired and try it out in your garden and
see that you're successful at it and see that it works for your climate and your region so that's
the first thing i'd say is go and learn about the old varieties of roses they don't have to be that
old they can be like i said the the older david austins the the hybrid teas the early hybrid teas
the hybrid musks are from the first part of the 20th century so they don't have to be hundreds
of years old and they don't have to be just once bloomers but there are lots of roses out there
that maybe you don't know about that if you tried in your garden you might love them i will put a
list down in the description of the video of some of my favorite books on roses but also you can get
them in videos i've made a whole series on the old garden roses and the different classes that you
can go through just as a starting point jumping off point to learning about roses you might want
to grow the second thing of course is to collect them i'm going to put a star and asterisk beside
this one and return to it a minute collecting them can be as easy as finding them at a
nursery and and purchasing them online having them shipped to you they can be a little bit harder to
find so i will return to the topic the third thing is once you have them in your garden obviously you
want to grow them you want to grow them well but you also want to label them tag them it's actually
one of the most important things you could do is have them in your garden and have a tag that
says what it is that if for later propagation or later preservation efforts that you know what
they are enough said on that point uh the fourth thing is it should learn how to propagate roses
people say to me well that's hard and i get it i think it can be a really really rewarding part
of the hobby and you know obviously there are some ways that you can share your roses
that don't involve propagation but propagation makes it a more certain thing once you have roots
on that rose you can trade it you can send it in the mail you can be pretty certain that somebody
else can take that and grow it in their garden and succeed with it and so like i say i think it
can be a fun and rewarding part of the hobby so i would just encourage you lots of resources on that
whether you use my videos you can use mike kinkade's there's lots of people telling you
how to propagate roses finally i would say now comes time to share your roses and by
sharing i don't mean necessarily you have to give them away although you can you give them
to neighbors or friends or other people in your rows area in the area that love roses
but you can also sell them or trade them and that's fine too there's lots of ways to go
around this i'm going to put an asterisk beside that one too because the sharing part of it
and the collecting part of it go together in this special class of activities
that even though i say individual action is where i prefer to put my efforts you're going to need
other people for those activities so whenever you find a rose or whether you're trying to
you know disseminate the roses you're going to have to connect with other people
behind me is my stock field of roses these are the mother plants i take all my cuttings from
about 300 different varieties that i've collected over the last 15 years at first i had an easy time
finding them in the trade but then a couple of those suppliers dried up just disappeared off
the map and parts of their catalogs i haven't seen on the market ever since which just you
know concerns me i guess that's the whole point of this is that some of those are just gone and they
might be living in people's gardens at this point but i wouldn't know about it which is what we try
to bring people together and trade these varieties and conserve them and keep them in into the trade
to that end i created something called the canada rose exchange that's a facebook group where people
who are interested in roses can join obviously you can just join up to share pictures of your garden
and talk about the problems that you have but one of the main purposes of the exchange is that
people trade roses in fact i've come across many people who have different roses that i didn't
grow and we've worked out trading deals where they would root their rows i would have my stock here
and then when they had it ready they would send it to me and i would give them a rose in exchange
that's the way it's supposed to work i want to give you an example of etual de hollande this one
came out of the blue for me somebody from the Vancouver rose society just reached out to me
by email one day and said hey there's an early hybrid tea climber called 'Etoile de Hollande'
climbing would you like one i said sure well it just appeared on my front doorstep one day
no exchange required or asked but what what a what a wonderful uh generous gesture that he did i'm
sure not just for my sake but for the future of that rose to get it into people's gardens so this
is this is why you need other people to help you with this and uh even though i i really feel like
i like the individual mode of action you don't need a bureaucracy you don't need um you know a
committee you don't need a bunch of volunteers you just need to do it yourself and that keeps
you in control it also keeps it kind of resilient that is you're not going to be hit by a funding
decrease from the community garden or from the uh from from the government so it keeps it a little
more resilient as far as i'm concerned but it also keeps it a little bit more you know local that is
you know i can trade with people in my local area i can grow towards my local growing conditions
it keeps it kind of a little more resilient as far as i'm concerned if there are a bunch of people
all over the place maintaining these roses and trading amongst themselves but you do need to
have that group action mode sometimes and it can be very very useful i want to talk to you about
one of those instances last week i got to attend a virtual tour of the Summerland ornamental gardens
up near Kelowna or near Summerland bc now the cool thing about their garden is it's volunteer
organized and operated Rick one of the volunteers presented the information about the gardens
they've got lots of wonderful old gardens in there things that are rare in the trade
now Prairie Peace came from my farm here he got that from me a number of years ago they have lots
of other old canadian roses they have lots of other old david austin roses and they just have
a dedicated group of volunteers who maintain and deadhead and present these roses to the public but
one of the cool things about the garden is that it it acts as a repository it stays there
as they've identified these roses and maintained these roses it becomes a uh a safety spot for
these roses to live in the gardens and that if somebody like me wants to come along later and get
cuttings for that that's a deal i have coming up i'm going to visit there next summer and i'm going
to work with Rick to get some of those propagated and get them back into the trade a little bit
so i think that this is a wonderful example of what local action can do from individuals who are
very interested in keeping roses in the trade well i shared that story really to send the message
that any one of you any one of us really can become a hero in this preservation effort i want
to share with you one more preservation effort that's going on right now and this comes from
a friend of mine kimberly from the rose geek youtube channel you remember we did
a collaboration not too long ago well she's taken on a slightly different angle on this her thought
is that maybe some people are reluctant to try to propagate their own roses so maybe they could
take the cuttings and send those to suppliers and she's had a number of suppliers down in the states
sign on for this kind of an exchange where the customer will send them the cuttings and then the
supplier will give them some kind of benefit in return i think that's a great idea
what a wonderful way to get rare roses into the hands of the people who can propagate them
and get and again go and disseminate those roses in the world after that one of the other things
that she's done to go along with that is to put together a list of what rose's people want and
what they're trading and everything else those are available through her youtube uh
group the sorry facebook group the Rose Geeks facebook group
and people have asked me the question of whether i would join something like that or whether i would
whether i would welcome that kind of an exchange and the answer is an emphatic yes of course
if you have cuttings so i mean i would prefer to get rooted roses from local people who can tell me
uh you know that they've grown them in their gardens that they love them they do well in this
area that would be my strongest preference but that being said i will trust you i will trust you
from wherever you are that a rose is worth growing in a garden send me the name if i
don't have it already and you can stand behind it and say yes i definitely think that this is
worth having in gardens then we will find a way i mean as i say i prefer to get rooted roses but
uh if it's a matter of you're uncomfortable with your propagation skills and you can only send the
cuttings or it's the right time of year for that we will work something out on that the the whole
point here is to get roses again into the hands of people uh get them growing get them growing in
multiple places get them trading get them moving all of this is to the good so i can wholeheartedly
get behind that effort i think it's a great move especially again she's she's working out of the us
you know for the u.s suppliers i think that's a fantastic thing this might be a thing worldwide
you know obviously youtube is a worldwide audience where each country has to manage their own
kind of efforts or even each region or location has to manage their own efforts so i don't think
it's just going to be one magic bullet that solves this whole thing but it warms my heart and makes
me very excited to see so many different leaders coming out there working towards preservation
of these out-of-trade roses around the world all right thank you so much for watching that's all
i have on the topic if you have any questions please drop those down in the comments below