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Propagating a Rose
12 June 2024
When we published our slide show of A JFK Rose in January, we mentioned we would have to leave this beautiful rose bush behind when the house was sold. James Kelly asked if there wasn't some way to transplant it to our own garden.
We didn't want to deprive the neighborhood of that beauty but we remembered how our brother took a date to a restaurant with a rose on the table. He took it home and planted it and it actually rooted. Not only that but he married the girl!
It sounded like magic to us then but we never forgot that you can propagate a rose.
The other day when we were dropping off a few boxes of things that a friend agreed to store for a mutual friend out of the country, we got around to talking about the roses again.
She just happened to be propagating some.
She'd learned the technique at the San Francisco Garden Club and told us what to do. Clip a stem with four buds in it, cut the bottom and top off at 45 degree angles, pop it into soil so most of it is covered, put a jar over it and keep the dirt moist. In two months you might have a rose.
That's one of her stems about to be planted on the left.
We enhanced our understanding of the process with an article by Master Rosarian Kitty Belendez, which said about the same thing as our friend.
So we took some cuttings. We were afraid we might not have done it quite right so the next day we took one more, but this time from a stem that was still blooming.
The image up top is the bloom.
Not that we need another hobby, but we'd love to see one of these stems survive and become a descendant of the bush Mom kept blooming.
It was in full bloom for Mother's Day and her birthday this year. So we took a rose for each son to her grave on both occasions.
This one, though, we brought home. Hoping it would thrive here, much as we have.