Sunday, February 10, 2002		Garden Life

For a garden full of roses
Satish Narula

GARDENERS always strive for perfect blooms in quick succession. This gives joy not only to the gardner but also to the visitors. Every plant is different. To get the best out of a plant, you have to understand its characteristics.

Most flowering plants, annuals or a shrub, are free flowering. Some of these like rose, dahlia carnation, chrysanthemum etc., can be manipulated to give a desired number of blooms per plant. Chrysanthemum are almost finished by now and it is too early to talk about carnations and dahlia etc. The rose is flowering at the moment and soon it will give another flush.

Those who had pruned their roses in the middle of October have had the first flush of blooms. I received a few queries from gardeners on how and why there were fewer flowers than expected. There can be many reasons for this. The foremost reason could be the continuance of dying or dead bloom on the plant.

In roses, every bud below a flowering bud is a potential flowering bud. The phenomenon of apical dominance i.e. when the terminal shoot, be it the main or the side shoot, grows it does not allow the buds below to come out. As the flowers are borne terminally no bud below them can bloom.

No more blooms will be obtained unless the existing ones are removed. What we usually see is that the blooms are not plucked even after they have faded. The petals fall down and the bud starts seeding. Most of the plant’s energy is diverted and wasted on it.

If you want to retain blooms on the plant for some time then keep a watch. As soon as the flowers start fading remove them if they have two ‘eyes’ (buds) below them. The buds below will immediately start blooming.

If you want to put the flowers in a vase for indoor display, try not to remove very long cuttings. The smaller the cutting with the bloom, the quicker will the next flower bloom.

Another reason could be aphids. These tiny devils congregate on developing buds in thousands and suck the sap. The bud dies a premature death. Spray rogor mixed at a ratio of one mililitre to a litre of water. Repeat after a fortnight. In between two flushes of blooms, the rose bush sometimes gets leaf spot or powdery mildew infestation. Spray bavistin at half gram to a litre of water to get rid of this.