Roses must be the most overrated and the most underrated of plants. It’s not hard in this season, though, to let go of opinion and enjoy them unreservedly.

Overrated in the way some small dogs are: pampered beyond all reason or regard for their actual needs, spotlighted in awkward isolation, given ridiculous haircuts, overbred, overfed, overmedicated and overaccessorized. Come on, people! It’s just a plant.

Then again, it’s some plant — in fact, many plants. Rose species are native all over the world, including here: Rosa californica, R. gymnosperma, R. minutifolia, R. nutkana, for example. Many are gorgeously scented, though one must note that there’s not really a categoric “rose” scent. Their flowers are handsome; their fruit (”hips”) can be tasty, nutritious and good for tea; their foliage is usually good-looking whether glossy, or crinkled like R. rugosa’s, or naturally silvery like R. glauca’s.

They’re an urban asset. A friend of ours used a planting of well-armed old rose varieties trained up along her house, and said she had heard at least one would-be burglar yelping and swearing and finally giving up when he tried to climb into a high window.

Both native bees and honeybees like them. Bumblebees will roll around in the middle of a rose blossom the way they do in a California poppy, the way a cat does in catnip. It must work as thorough pollination, and it’s certainly fun to watch. If the bees get as much pleasure as we do from roses, good for them.

That scent must be intoxicating — those scents, rather, for while most have something in common, the fragrances of roses are as individual as their looks. That classic rose aroma rises from the ‘Mlle Cécile Brünner’ by our driveway; several of the yellow roses we’ve sniffed have clear citrus notes. Some roses are described as smelling spicy-warm like carnations; some seem rather like red wine.

To sit in a garden like Carolyn Parker’s in Lafayette on a sunny day is to enjoy an olfactory as well as visual symphony, with choruses of white varieties in the foreground and breeze-borne solos from the yellows along the border, the pinks against the house and the deep reds on the west side all winding through at unpredictable moments. When the gilded white specimen on the arbor overhead starts dropping petals into our tea, the whole performance becomes impossibly romantic.

Parker is a rosarian by our standards: She knows the names of all her roses. But she defers to the experts she consults, who give her histories and breeding data and hair-fine distinctions about species and varieties and their ancestors and their peculiarities.

One handsome shrub on her corner is a bicolor Rosa foetida, which, almost disappointingly, doesn’t smell fetid at all — it smells, in fact, close to edible, with overtones of cucumber and rye bread. The flower is starkly spectacular, a single circle of petals deep scarlet above, bright yellow below. “This species put the yellow in the usable gene pool,” Parker says. And, introducing Ron to a climber: “This is Rosa multiflora, ancestral to lots of the roses, like the polyanthas, with clustered flowers.”

R. multiflora, like R. rugosa, has naturalized in some wild places in North America. Some of the tough survivors in the Bay Area — plants that survived years of complete neglect (or independence) on Alcatraz Island, the ‘Cécile Brünner’ that persists by the railroad tracks in Albany — demonstrate that roses don’t necessarily need pampering, let alone the chemical cocktail some folks give them.

Parker tells Ron, over that rose-floated tea, “I used to give new plants a systemic insecticide/fertilizer to discourage aphids when I started them out, and was I beginning to feel bad about that. So one year, when I was down to just a couple of packs of systemic, I decided to experiment. I used those up, used some organic fertilizer on the rest, and compared. Both groups were the same — not many aphids at all.”

It makes sense to be kind to your bugs. Leaf-cutter bees, who leave funny, harmless round “bites” in rose leaves, are also very effective pollinators. Ladybeetles and soldier beetles eat aphids and other pests, and like other predators, get wiped out fast by poisons in their prey. Parker’s garden, alive with bees, hoverflies, and other friendly life-forms, demonstrates that gorgeous plants thrive along with benign insects.

Some old roses have pedigrees that go back to the wars of York and Lancaster. Others have been lost and found again. “Rose rustling” — pursuing neglected roses in country cemeteries and other such venues — may have originated in Texas, but it’s going strong in California. One prize named ‘Cemetery Angel’ came from, yes, a cemetery with a stone angel. It’s considered good rustling form to take cuttings rather than dig up the whole plant, unless one is salvaging just ahead of the bulldozers.

You can meet a sampling at the Celebration of Old Roses in El Cerrito. One boon for novices: The roses are displayed by category, so you can learn some taxonomy as you view and sniff. You can also look for Parker’s handsome book “R Is for Rose: Reflections From a Passionate Rose Lover” for her seductive photographs and rose lore (her Web site is www.rosesfromatoz.com).

source : www.sfgate.com