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Just Say No to Chemicals
My Journey to All Natural Rose Gardening.
Written by Paul F. Zimmerman - This article accompanied a lecture given at the
New York Botanical Garden and was published in the Sustainable Rose Garden -
2008
I
suppose my journey to an “All-Green” Rose Garden truly
began when I was a boy and stems from what didn’t happen
at our home in the Miami, Florida suburb I grew up in.
What didn’t happen is mostly due to my ancestry of being
a first-generation American. My family hails from The
Netherlands -- a tiny little country on the North Sea
where land is so precious you do not mistreat it. When
preparing a new field for your crop first involves
draining the ocean, you work hard to be a good steward
of the land. This was passed to my parents who then
passed it on to me.
What
didn’t happen in that suburban lawn in South Miami in
the 1960’s was chemicals. Our lawn was a cheerful
mish-mash of St. Augustine and bermuda grass, plus
whatever weeds grew in-between. If it was “green and we
could mow it” it was lawn. Shrubs grew happily without
extra care and watering was rarely done, if only because
the hoses that needed to be dragged around weighed a
ton. Fruit trees from avocado to mango to key lime to
grapefruit grew, bore fruit and were never treated with
anything.
Occasionally the lawn got a fresh load of top soil
scattered across it but that was about it. While others
were living on perfect lawns laced with chemicals, we
never bothered and let nature run its course. Returning
to The Netherlands for visits I would see all my
relatives treating their land the same way and thought
nothing of it. In 1988 Queen Beatrix in her annual
Christmas Speech challenged the tiny little country to
go greener than it already was, and as a result the
Dutch are among the world’s leaders in that field and
have been for the last twenty-five years.
With
this mindset I once again began gardening again in the
early 1990s. I was living in Los Angeles, California
looking for a new direction in my life and came upon
roses as a recreational hobby. That I was hooked is
evidenced in what I do for a living today so there is no
need to elaborate on that. Keep in mind Southern
California during that time was a hotbed of Hybrid Teas,
rose exhibiting and gardens grown artificially out of
the desert. Like one giant movie set those gardens had
to be perfect without a grass blade out place, a weed
nowhere to be found and roses that looked like they were
made of silk. All of this took massive amounts of
chemicals – most of them dangerous.
As with
most things in life, my foray into the professional
world of roses was an accident. A member of our rose
society asked me to help prune their roses then a
neighbor asked me what I charged, and in 1992 a rose
care company was born. Having just started into roses
and knowing little about them, I simply followed the
prevalent thought of the time as to what roses needed.
Products like Orthene, Funginex, Avid, Peters 20-20-20
and various other chemicals were applied to my
customer’s roses like clockwork. Even then it made me
uncomfortable and I began to look for another way.
One of
the products we did apply was fish emulsion. While
smelly, it was incredibly effective and the greening of
the foliage and health of the plants was instantly
apparent. This was as close to a natural product as we
used in our rose care program and it seemed to outshine
the others in terms of long term effect. My rose mentor
was Dr. Thomas Cairns - one of the best minds I know in
regards to what roses need nutritionally. Tommy knew I
preferred more natural methods and his advice in helping
me formulate my early natural rose care programs was
invaluable and a credit to his broader view of the rose
world.
The
first natural treatment we did was for powdery mildew.
Simply put, Tommy put together the following, 1 tbs each
of baking soda, insecticidal soap, canola oil and white
vinegar. The baking soda would penetrate the membrane
of the mildew spore and dehydrate it, thus killing it.
The soap would help with aphids and the canola oil
worked as a spreader sticker. The white vinegar
emulsified it all. It worked very well and although not
as quickly as chemicals, I was beginning to get
customers who were willing to live with roses that did
not look like they came off a MGM back lot.
I also
began to get heavily into Antique Roses. The varieties
available were those that had stood the test of time so
the group as a whole was more disease resistant than
many modern roses, which grew up dependant on
chemicals. Perhaps the problem was not that roses were
chemically dependent, but that we were growing the wrong
kinds of roses - and when we did grow disease resistant
Garden Rose varieties, we cared for them with the wrong
philosophy.
To find
a way to apply my thoughts, I began from the bottom up
and that meant the soil. The soils I came upon in my
client’s rose gardens were constantly blown clean of all
leaves and debris leaving a very sterile environment.
Already knowing a forest floor where leaves and
everything else is allowed to naturally decompose is one
of the richest soils in the world, it made sense to jump
start these gardens with some form of non-sterile
compost containing living microbes. Everything sold in
stores at the time was “sterilized”, which defeated the
purpose. Instead we made trips to the Los Angeles
Equestrian Center where out back was a mountain of
shredded, composted horse manure and shavings. Hauling
it to our client’s gardens in pickup trucks, we spread
it three to four inches thick. The result was simply
astonishing. Roses that had done just okay even with
fertilizers suddenly took off and bloomed beautifully.
They began to get less disease and even better I was
able to cut back on the watering. We were on our way.
My
research took me into the world of mycrorizzan and their
impact on plant life. Mycrorizzan attach themselves to
the plant’s roots, put out long tendrils then draw
nutrients and water toward the plant from a distance
beyond the reach of its roots. In exchange they receive
sugars from the plants as food. Constantly cleaning
out our gardens of composted plant life and pouring
systemic “All-in-One” chemicals into the ground
sterilizes our soil, making our roses more and more
chemically dependent. Instead of raising roses we were
raising junkies.
In the
mid 1990s downy mildew began to rear its ugly head in
Southern California. This disease can take down a rose
in three days or less and the only “cure” at the time
was to cut back the roses, spray them with sulfur and
hope for the best. Remarkably of the some sixty plus
rose gardens we took care of downy mildew hit the
chemically dependent roses hardest. My roses at home
that were raised naturally ala my “Dutch” methods were
never hit and the clients converting to our natural
program lost few if any roses. Perhaps roses kept
healthy through a well-balanced natural diet, gently
exposed to local strains of pathogens would slowly build
their own immunity?
In
another twist of fate, my wife’s brother came down with
stage four melanoma cancer. This is a “write your will”
stage of this particular cancer. Forgoing chemo and
radiation he chose the Gerson Diet. This treatment is
built on the philosophy that the human body already has
within it the ability to fight any disease if you just
remove the chemicals (in the form of preservatives,
growth hormones found in meat etc) that distract it from
focusing on the disease – in this case cancer. Call it
the Slow Food Movement Health Care Plan. Happily
fourteen years later he is completely cancer free as a
result. Would the same apply to plants?
The
last part of this journey before I made the transition
from thought to action came about on our farm in South
Carolina. Before we moved here full time I planted some
sixty roses on the property. I amended the soil well
with horse manure, planted them and for five years they
were never sprayed, fertilized or irrigated. Every year
I went back in spring to find them a little healthier
and less disease present than the previous year. Roses
like Yolande d’Argon, Alchymist and others, slowly
stopped getting blackspot even though it had run rampant
in their adolescence. I discussed this observation with
many rosarians and few if any disagreed, plus noticed
the same thing when they stopped spraying. What I took
away from this period is that the right rose, grown in
good healthy soil, on a synthetic-chemical free program
designed to build the soil and plant’s long term health
in tandem, is in the long run able to ward off diseases
and be a better plant.
This
thought was temporarily shelved when I started Ashdown
Roses. As with any new business it took all my time and
more. At Ashdown initially we used chemicals because as
a commercial nursery we were regularly inspected by the
USDA regarding our shipping license, but we still
followed the practice of amending the soil every year
with composted horse manure. My home rose garden
continued on without any treatments and I added rose
after rose, including many considered disease prone to
continue to test my theories. Happily, even the disease
prone ones soon became healthy plants after a period of
adjustment.
Soon we
began planting the Ashdown Rosarium. This is a rose
garden open to the public, based on the design of the
Fineschi Garden in Italy. The Modern roses are arranged
in beds by hybridizer and the Antique roses by class.
Currently holding close to 2000 roses, it covers 3 acres
and will eventually hold 6000-7000 varieties of roses of
all kinds. Its goals are preservation, presentation and
education of our national flower, the rose. All the
roses grown in the Rosarium are now grown without
synthetic chemicals.
With
the nursery settling in and the start of the Rosarium, I
was now able to slowly work in other natural treatments,
and the process of weaning our roses off chemicals
began. I began contacting every “organic” fertilizer
company I could find, explained to them what I was
doing, and my eventual goal of putting together a
complete natural rose care program that began with the
soil. Product after product arrived, I would section
off a few roses and test it, or take it home and test it
there. While many worked, I felt it was still too
scattered in its approach.
The
second part of my goal was to create a rose care program
that was easy to use. I wanted to do away with the
guesswork of having to figure out which products went
with which. I approached several companies and few
“got” the complete approach I was after. The nursery by
this time was getting off chemicals by using practices I
had developed back in Los Angeles. Unfortunately they
were not practical for the home gardener.
While
at a Home and Garden Show in Charlotte, NC I met Billy
Styles owner of Organic Plant HealthCare. I’d been
impressed by their booth and the professional appearance
of their products. I left my card, asking for Billy to
stop by my booth at some point. When he did he began
quizzing me about what I did for my roses. One of his
first questions was how did I put my roses to bed? This
stopped me cold, but when he explained the importance of
not only shutting down the plant but also of keeping the
soil alive during the winter, I thought perhaps I had
found the partner I was looking for. Explaining my
thoughts for a Complete Natural Rose Program, Billy in
five minutes not only understood it but I suspect
figured out how to bring it about. I then took the idea
to Peter and Richard Beales and they agreed to become
involved.
Billy
and I tested product after product at Ashdown Roses and
my home. The Beales Family did the same. Richard
Beales and I made notes on what we wanted from our roses
at certain times of the season and Billy formulated
products based on those plus his knowledge of soil
construction and plant life. After a season’s worth of
testing we had a program in place, and by then Ashdown
and the Rosarium were completely synthetic chemical free
thanks to Billy’s guidance. If I am going to tell
people to use this program, I need to use it myself and
that includes the commercial and Rosarium end of what we
do.
The
result is the Peter Beales Complete Natural Rose Care
product line. In essence it is perhaps the only
complete natural rose care line that works on the
premise of healthy soil = healthy roses = less disease
and stress. Each product was custom formulated by Billy
to do certain things at certain times during the
season. It is not a cookie cutter product whereby you
simply apply the same formula in the coolness of spring
as you do in the heat of summer as you do in the waning
days of fall. We also made it easy. As the products
are mixed fresh, they are mailed to your door when it is
time to use them. You know its time to feed your roses
when the product shows up in your mailbox.
The
country of my ancestors has been green for decades.
This journey has simply been one back to my past - to
not doing now what we did not do then in our suburban
Miami garden. Rose growing should be easy, fun and
clean and it’s important we continue down this
sustainable path. |
