Single-flowered roses set my toes tapping. They are just as colorful as roses with double flowers—but those doubles don't provide the added appeal of the "boss" (as it's called) of pistols and stamens at the center. With double-flowered roses, more is less.
Here's a famous single-flowered that should be welcome in any garden that's celebrating red. It's Rosa moyesii 'Geranium'. 'Tomato' would be more accurate, but since this rose originated in England way back in the 1930's, when tomatoes—which have to be grown in greenhouses there, and who, in the Depression, could have afforded it?—were probably paler and blander than what we can grow in North America. So 'Geranium' is it.



I have a pair of Geraniums, to anchor a pair of beds in the South Red Garden. (Oh yes, there's another pair of beds in the North Red Garden. It happens.) Young plants, this is their first season of bloom ever. There's a lot of open space in each bed to allow for their mature size, which can be 6 - 8 feet tall and wide. Although the bush is once-blooming, that's not the end of the red by any means: The hips, like little flasks, are red too. (Thank you, www.About-Garden.com, for the glorious picture.)


'Geranium' roses are hard to find, oddly, so thank you North Creek Farm.

Rosa roxburghii is on my must-grow list time after time.
The single flowers (hooray!), large and in pale pink (ugh), are the least of the appeal for me.
But by blooming, the bush shows that it's happy, which is its own satisfaction regardless of the aesthetics. For my money, this rose is essential for overall form.
It's a monster of a bush—even here at the Zone-6 bottom of its range—getting ten feet tall and fifteen wide. But the real value of that size is that it's achieved via canes that get as thick as saplings. And so the rose can be trained up into a small tree, as I've done here.

So-called "tree" roses aren't generally hardy this far North: the trunk is grafted onto the rootstock, and the bushy and blooming top portion is grafted onto the trunk. One portion or another always fails in a New England Winter.

A tree-rose form of Rosa roxburghii, though, is the same individual top to bottom, bloom to root. And the trunk gets thick enough (at least over time), that the tree can be truly self-supporting too. It's a unique talent in hardy roses.


The ferny leaves are a classy texture when the blooms are done.
The bush is once-blooming only—a plus for me but a disappointment for those of you who actually like pink.

I cut back any branches that grow too far outside the general globe, and I adjust the stake so that the entire structure doesn't topple in some now-that-global-warming-is-really-here freak blizzard or ice-storm. But in time, this tree-rose will be stake-free and on its own, proud and pretty.

I've planted mine in one of my street-side beds, which would never happen if the plant in question weren't a year-round asset. Look for it if you visit Rhode Island: Mine is the only Rosa roxburghii tree in the state.

Such a multi-talented rose:
—Delicate four-petal white flowers with a bouncy, darker-hued levitating poof of pistols in the center.  (I didn't say big four-petal white flowers, though.  An inch and a half, tops.)
—Inch-and-a-half leaves with minute leaflets so small they look ferny.
—Burgundy-pink action at the base of the leaves......which is the protective scale that had covered the young leaf through the Winter. By happy accident, it's chatting nicely with the burgundy of the cut-leaf Japanese maple in the background.
All tidy, tiny, and tame. Those aren't cursewords for me, but still, I have my limits. And indeed, the real reason I grow this rose is because it has such a counter-intuitively ferocious and colorful Winter show.
Thanks to rainyside.com, take a look at this:
Those unique, scarlet, translucent thorns are on eager new canes, just sprouted that Spring, that have yet to leaf out. They'll catch the low Winter sunlight with wierd talent.
When they leaf out the next Spring, their thorns will have dulled completely, as on the older cane at the center.
To grow a rose for the flowers is normal. To nod to appealing leaves is the next deeper level of sophistication. To grow a rose for the thorns that look particularly blood-thirsty in Winter when the bush is leafless and the wind is howling? Morticia Addams would be proud.
My red-spined rose is just getting it's head together, and is just barely big enough and old enough to bloom, yes. Maybe this season it will grow some new canes energetically enough that they'll sport the red spines this coming Winter. Those new canes can be encouraged by pruning the entire bush hard right after flowering. This maximizes the Winter show, but because it also removes the older canes, which have the flowers, there would be no Spring bloom to follow. Morticia would be proud of that too. My fantasy is to grow this rose as a standard, by cutting all the branches that grow out of a single point at the top of one main trunk back to that same point—and yes, right after flowering. No flowers, but what a Winter show. Morticia, I'm shoulder-to-shoulder with you: Thorns trump flowers. Bloodthirsty is better than pretty. Ferocious is more fabulous than tame.