Roses are (probably) worth the hassle; just ask your nose

If there is any plant that makes me feel like I have a garden-related split personality disorder, it’s roses. My feelings for them range from head-over-heels love, the kind that you can’t imagine living without, to complete and utter loathing. There is very little gray area.

I contemplated this relationship — the epitome of love-hate — over the weekend as I coddled my beloved, or possibly abhorred, roses in preparation for winter. Easy-care roses, which come in a variety of trademarked names including Oso Easy, Carefree and Knockout, are treated like any other shrub in my garden, which is to say mostly left to fend for themselves in winter. But there are a few special roses, mostly English roses bred by David Austin, that get special treatment.

This involves different types of winter dressing, which can be summed up with protecting the crown of the plant. I do this by employing various strategies of piling up material — compost or shredded leaves — over the top of the plant and containing that material in one contraption or another. This year I used something called a rose collar, a 14-inch tall plastic ring that encircles the plant and is filled with organic “insulation” and an open-ended box created out of foam insulation board, again filled with leaves, on a pair of Fighting Temeraire roses in containers.

 The climbing rose Autumn Sunset gets a different treatment because the goal with it is to overwinter the canes, not just the roots. I tip the entire thing over and gently bend down the canes, laying them in a trench where I bury them in the ground. This is the same rose that is besieged by sawfly larvae (aka rose slugs) every spring, leaving it looking haggard but otherwise unharmed.

It wouldn’t be wrong to question whether all the fuss is worth it. In fact, several years ago I swore off roses entirely. That lasted for about two years before I was again captivated by them. And it’s not so much their beauty that triggers this infatuation, but rather their scent. In my estimation, only flowering sweet peas can beat a rose in a best-scent competition in the garden.

All scented roses (and I would argue that it’s not really a rose if it doesn’t have a scent) smell slightly different. The Alnwick roses that got the rose collar treatment over the weekend have a scent that smells a bit like a ripe raspberry, where as Fighting Temeraire offers a bit of honey.

Scent is so important to rose aficionados that they might spend more time describing how a specific rose smells than they do describing how it looks. The pale yellow Vanessa Bell rose is described in the David Austin catalog as having a fragrance “similar to green tea with aspects of lemon and honey.” Jude the Obscure has a “strong fruity fragrance, reminiscent of guava and sweet white wine, sometimes with a strong citrus bias.”

It’s difficult to imagine these complicated scents. In fact, I suppose the only way to experience them is to grow them, and to remember how lovely they are when I’m busy loathing them.