Rose hipsters

Scott Dickensheets

Thursday, April 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Look at this place! It's a parade of roses, a tower of flower, a thornucopia. There are something like 250 rose bushes in Jill Barnard's back yard in Green Valley, dozens of hybrid varieties, and it's more than enough to rose-bowl you over.

Elvis doesn't look impressed.

A bit of fauna among this exuberance of flora, the Barnard family cat seems immune to the charms of the gorgeous blooms, which have for centuries captivated artists, poets and manly British kings. Not even the Graceland hybrid is enough to rouse him from his tail-swishing insouciance on the block wall.

Barnard is somewhat more animated on the subject, even though -- despite the rows of roses around her -- this hasn't been a great year for Barnard the gardener. Unlike Elvis, she's a busy cat; thanks to her workload as a sales executive at Lake Las Vegas, she barely has time to stop and smell the roses, much less take proper care of them.

"This white crap, that's mildew," she says, bending over a bush, tsking herself for letting things get this far. "Mildew happens when it's 70 to 80 during the day but 50 or 60 at night. It's the combination of temperatures that causes it."

Ideally, Barnard would spend three or four hours a week pruning, weeding and sniffing, plus another four hours a month fertilizing. "You can spend as much time as you want fiddling with them," she says. That she has not been able to devote adequate time to them doesn't bode well for her chances of repeating last year's triumph at this weekend's Rose Show, sponsored by the Las Vegas Valley Rose Society, of which she is a member.

"There are 36 sections in the exhibit," she says. "Last year I won 15 of 36." For instance, she took first, second and third place (or, in rose parlance, queen, king and princess) in the miniature roses class, and queen and best of show among the hybrid-teas roses. She sighs. "This year, I'll be lucky to make it to the show."

Well, she'll always have last year. "The other members said they'd take up a collection to send me anywhere I wanted this month," she says, laughing. "It was almost embarrassing. I almost felt bad." That's how it goes in the bloom-eat-bloom world of competitive growing; rose buds one day, fierce rivals the next.

A rose may be a rose may be a rose, but not to the true aficionado. To such a person, the flower is an object of affection, of obsession, even. They revel in its hundreds of varieties, thrill to its distinguished history. To the subject they bring a passion and a store of horticultural knowledge that can make the unschooled feel like blooming idiots.

Don't be fooled by Barnard's several hundred carefully labeled plants -- from the delicate pink Barbara Bushes to the deep, velvety red Trumpeters, and every Cary Grant, Brigadoon, Anastasia, Tiny Petals and Herbie hybrid in between.

"I'm not compulsive or anything," she says.

Of course not! One shouldn't read anything into the four national rose conventions and six regional ones she's attended since getting bitten by the rose bug in 1989. Nor should one attach undue significance to the whirlpool spa that doesn't occupy one corner of this most pleasant back yard. It was abandoned when Barnard realized she could plant roses in that space.

"We have one member who has 900 bushes," says Jackie Jackson, society president. "She has a small lot, so she grows most of them in pots. It's rather amazing when you think about 900 potted plants." Jackson and her husband, Dick -- one of the society's founders in 1969 -- have upwards of 270 bushes themselves.

Barnard wades into her garden to find an example of a winning rose. She grabs a Dolly Parton, so named for its, ahem, large blossoms. "It's got good form, a high center," she says, noting that the petals in the middle rise properly. "It's symmetrical; the petals don't droop below the bottom of the bloom."

Like many rose hipsters, Barnard got into the hobby in order to dress up a drab back yard. "I had this big fence I didn't know what to do with," she recalls. And then it hit her -- climbing roses! "I thought, 'You know, Mom had roses...' So I went out and bought 17 climbers, not realizing they spread 12-16 feet wide." Only five remain.

She started planting in earnest in 1990 and 1991, and immediately made another mistake. She let her enthusiasm outpace her knowledge, buying 110 plants, some of which weren't bred to bloom exhibit-quality flowers. "I bet I've trashed 50 of them," she says.

She acted quickly to remedy the horticultural wasteland of her knowledge. "I jumped right into it," she says. "I'm that way. I have to know how everything works. I bought all the books." She also hooked up with the Rose Society and began authoring its newsletter. "In order to write articles, I really had to do the research," she says. Barnard has since contributed articles on fertilization and so on to the American Rose Society's website. "I get five or six e-mails a week, from all over the world," she says. "A lot from Australia."

But ask her why she digs roses, and suddenly she has almost less to say than Elvis the cat. "They're real fun to watch grow," she offers. "What prettier flower is there? Everyone loves roses! And one of their best features is the fragrance."

Jackson has a few more ideas. "You can grow roses all year round," she says. "Mums, in the fall, are beautiful. So are irises in the spring. But they're just one time a year." While roses bloom best in the spring and fall, "I've had blooms I've cut off for Christmas," Barnard says.

And with hybridizers constantly working to develop new varieties to give offbeat names to, the rose grower has an endless selection. "They come in all colors, all sizes, all shapes," Jackson says.

And there's the tie to history: "They've been around, it seems like, forever," Jackson says. It's widely thought to have been the first flower brought under cultivation. The Romans grew roses and, later, the flower became the symbol of several kings. "Napoleon's wife, she had a beautiful rose garden. So they go way back."

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