Bye-Bye Fussy, Hello Friendly: Easy-Care Shrub Roses Dominating The Market

Download the news release in Microsoft Word format: Tesselaar News Release - Easycare Roses Dominating Market (03-01-2010).

Easy-care shrub roses are now taking a greater share of the market than fussier traditional rose varieties, say garden retailers across the country.

And now, with “green” and “environmentally sustainable” products at a premium, garden experts are forecasting an even bigger run on these tough-as-nails shrub roses. After all, they require less water and fewer chemicals all the way down the supply chain – from commercial growers to retailers to home gardeners.

“Like many independent garden centers, we’re seeing a drop in sales of traditional roses,” said Gary Gleason, manager of Cofer’s Home & Garden Showplace in Athens, Georgia. Gleason was one of several garden retailers asked the question “Rose Sales: Do They Smell as Sweet?” in the February issue of Nursery Retailer magazine. Easy-care shrub roses, Gleason continued, now account for 70 percent of his sales.

Other garden retailers interviewed reported the same trend. From 2006 to 2009, hybrid tea rose sales declined almost 69 percent for David Sherwood, owner of Sherwood’s Forest Nursery and Garden Center in Baldwin, Missouri. “We focus more on the varieties that have proven themselves in our area,” said Gleason. “The scarlet Flower Carpet^® and red Knock Out^® are two we use in a lot of our design/build landscapes because they perform well here.”

Traditional roses started falling out of favor with gardeners and landscapers 15 years ago, when Tesselaar Plants introduced the Flower Carpet series as the first “environmental shrub roses.” In addition to thriving without much water, the series also repelled aphids and was the last choice for hungry pests like Japanese beetles. It also didn’t succumb to disease like black spot and powdery mildew. Plus, these roses were self-cleaning – faded flowers fell off when done —  and it responded so well to pruning, you could virtually hack it to the ground with shears and it’d come back for more. To make growing them even easier, the company sold each plant with a specially formulated bag of fertilizer for optimal results.

Gardeners who’d given up on the old-school, high-maintenance varieties started flocking to garden centers, asking for the “rose in the pink pot.” Others called it the Wonder Rose. Brands like Knock Out, Carefree Wonder™ and Nearly Wild followed.

Easy-care shrub roses are now the rule – not the exception. In fact, About.com Gardening Guide Marie Iannotti cited “disease-resistant roses” in her Dec. 27, 2009, post “The Best Gardening Trends of the 2000s.”

“Disease-resistant plants, in general, have been good news for gardeners,” read her post. “But when the prima donnas of the garden, roses, start to flaunt their ease of growing, you know things have changed.”

If you still think roses are fussy and time-consuming, she continued, you’re definitely growing the wrong ones. “Series like Flower Carpet and the Knock Out are pretty much fail-safe,” she wrote, “but many recent landscape roses have been bred in answer to our despair.”

And the color selection, varieties and quality keep getting better.

Flower Carpet Amber – one of three new Next Generation Flower Carpet roses (offering 15 years of extra breeding for even better heat and humidity tolerance recently won the coveted designation as an All Deutschland Rose (the world’s highest honor for disease resistance). All three Next Generation Colors – Amber, Scarlet and Pink Supreme – also  outperformed three out of four home testers’ other roses – in addition to other perennials and shrubs – in a nationwide survey conducted to find out how they survived in last summer’s weather extremes. They also performed the best of all roses tested between 2006 and 2009 at Cornell University.

It’s easy being green

And this year, with buzzwords like “green,” “eco-friendly” and “environmental sustainable” flying around, easy-care shrub roses are poised for a takeover.

“They’re inherently eco-friendly because they’re drought-tolerant and disease- and pest-resistant,” says Anthony Tesselaar, cofounder and president of Tesslaar Plants. “That means they don’t need all the water and chemical sprays required by traditional roses.”

That also means they also qualify as “environmentally sustainable” – or produced in a way that conserves natural resources. (For more information, see this packet’s section on “Top 10 Garden Trends for 2010.”)

“Gardeners really do want such products,” says Tesselaar. A 2009 study by brand-marketing firm BBMG, he points out, revealed that a majority of consumers believe they “can make a positive difference by purchasing products from socially or environmentally responsible companies.”

And now, more than ever, they’re acting on those beliefs.  According to the study, 67 percent of consumers said they would buy socially or environmentally responsible products, even in a difficult economy.

BBMG cofounder Raphael Bemporad explains: “The economic crisis has created a moment of reflection where consumers are redefining what truly matters and evaluating purchases based on both value and values.”