Inside a Master Rosarian's 300+ Rose Garden - Full Tour

Hey, what's up, garden friends? Kevin Jordan here from the Green Acres Garden Podcast. Today, I'm at my good friend, Linda Knowles' house. She is a master rosarian out here in Roseville, California, and we're gonna take you on a tour of your life to show you some of the best and most beautiful roses that you'll ever see. Let's go take a look right now. Well, hi, Kevin. I'm Linda Knowles. You already knew that. We are in Roseville, California, which is really funny because I have all these roses, so it's Roseville. I'm really happy about that. And this is my backyard of only a quarter acre, kind of a standard backyard size, quarter acre. And when I saw my setup here with just grass, I knew I wanted roses. And so here we are, quarter acre, backyard, and this is my tranquility and serenity. Can you break down a little bit, like the three, the different styles of roses, the types that we people plant there? I know we have standard, there's climbers and whatnot. Can you get into that a little bit? Sure. So, and I have all of those. You do. Hybrid teas are kind of everybody's favorite, maybe entry to rose growing. And that's the typical rose bush. That's the look of the florist rose. So it's got that beautiful circular rose at the top and everybody loves hybrid teas. I do too. Floribundas would be the next. They're easy to grow and they usually have more roses on the bush. More bloom. Flowers in abundance. Yeah, yeah. So Floribunda kind of sounds like that anyway. And so they go well with hybrid teas. They're kind of the same height most of the time. I've got a few mixed in together at my house too. So they mix together really well. They're happy together. Look at this spectacular bush of prosperity. So prosperity is a hybrid musk and it has small flowers in clusters on each stem. This is from 1919 and it's a climber. It's a large lady and she's just spectacular in the spring especially but does bloom all year. Prosperity is a climbing rose but climbing roses don't do this on their own. They would just grow out and fall apart. So there are wires that are screwed into the brick and prosperity's main canes are tied onto the wires. There are three rows of wires that keep her up against the brick wall. So this is a fairly new rose. I think I've had it for five years. This is called Coco Loco. It's a week's rose and it's that favorite new color especially of brides in their bouquets. That kind of brownish, rosy brownish and it's a Floribunda and it's just a very different kind of color that people are kind of mad for. So going from the Coco Loco, the kind of brown, we go into the kind of mauve-y lavender. This is actually called Violet's Pride, Violet from Downton Abbey and by the same hybridizer, this is a week's rose and this is a lovely light lavender. So I love the orange section and Chihuly rose. I have two bushes here, one in front and I love the Chihuly. Tom Carruth of Week's Roses tried to create the kind of light and color of Dale Chihuly, the glassblower artist. He has installations all over in Seattle, Las Vegas and sometimes they're blue or green but a lot of them are the yellow oranges and Tom Carruth of Week's Roses is just a marvel. He retired in 2015 and now is the curator at the Huntington Park Library Rose Garden in San Marino, Southern California. Since I like verticality in my garden, to me it's kind of too boring to have everything the same height. Just horizontal on one plane. So the verticality really works and my arbors, most of those are flowered climbers. Yeah, large flowered climbers and that's the category and so climbing roses, a lot of those climbing roses happen to be old garden roses. Old garden roses are before 1900. And are these oftentimes, some of those are the parent varieties to some of the new hybrids where they've gone back and hybridized these? Everything has come from the either China species or the Middle Eastern early roses or the French roses. So those have been hybridized. So those are the ancestors. Wow, that's so cool. I know it is cool. Now you talked about verticality. On the way in here, I was walking through a tunnel of your climbers and it was like being inside of a rosebush. You know, you really look at the roses more. When I'm in a rose park where there are just rose and rose and rose, you just kind of see the color way and you don't really look at the individual rose. So when you're walking through that, you are actually inside the roses and they're just kind of greeting you and they're looking out. And you just see the beauty of each one because they're more eye level and then up. Yeah. So then that's a Rose Allee. And what exactly is that? So the French word for alley is Allee. And so in my favorite gardens in France, my favorite garden was Roserie Delahaye. And they do have the huge arbors with the alleys and the arbors just go on and on with the roses over them. And I was enchanted by that. So I wanted to recreate that. I love combining roses on an arbor and the colors just always seem to go together but you might have in mind what you want. For instance, the darker pink with the lighter pink, I really love that one. This is a sweet rose, a miniature climbing rose called Renée. And this is an old garden rose called Madame Isaac Perriere. It's French. And the fragrance is fabulous. Yes, that old garden smell. Now your landscape here is just absolutely breathtaking. It's gorgeous, but it wasn't always like this. It was probably a normal backyard when you started. Normal backyard. When I just started, it was a clean pallet. There were no trees and it was grass wall to wall. And yeah. And so I knew I was gonna make some changes and I had to formulate what I was gonna do. So I just first set the perimeter. So I made the alley. I put roses on the perimeter, just easy stuff. I envisioned some sort of a structure and it wasn't until I saw a picture in a magazine that I saw one with this kind of a rounded metal top that I had an ironmonger make. I'm glad you did. Cause your garden, except for this few square feet, is raging warm. It has so much sunshine, which I guess is probably good for your roses. Right? However, the roses along the house in the alley get only half day sunshine, most of them. And in Sacramento, that works. Yeah, it's enough warmth, enough sun. Yeah, and the ones in the shade, that works as well. So this is Moonstone Rose. And you would think that you cannot grow big roses or any rose in the shade. This was happenstance. When I first planted the roses along here, this Photinia and the other bush were low. And so they were fine. And as it grew, the roses still remained. They're still healthy in the shade. But this is the Sacramento area. I have a whole row of roses that are slow to get started. But once they start, they keep on blooming. What are some of the layout concepts? I know you've been heavily influenced by French horticultural styles and landscaping. So I noticed you have this incredible landscape just behind me. And what is that? And how did you conceive? So that was grass. That was the last section of grass that I hadn't taken out. And I thought, what can I put here? Oh yeah, I love the parterre gardens in France. And the parterre refers to the little geometrical shapes. And then in the middle, I thought, what am I gonna put in the middle? A fountain? No, I already have a fountain. A big piece of pottery. That's pretty expensive. I know, a lime tree. Who doesn't love limes? All right. And so a lime tree is in the middle. I know. Sweet smelling flowers. Edible fruit. Yeah, why not? And then I knew I wanted a rose in every one. And so that's how that developed. Well, it's a beautiful contrast. And I think it adds to the beauty of your garden where some of the roses and the pathways kind of have a more, kind of a natural feel to them. And it's a little bit more organic feeling. And then you have this beautiful kind of geometric area where it's a little bit more symmetrical and you have, it just, it's pretty cool. I love classic design, but within a classic structure, you can go a little bit wild. So the alley could be straight, but I wanted it more meandering. The arbors are actually straight, but then the pathway is more meandering. Kind of flows like a little river. Yeah. That's awesome. Now, what is editing the garden? And do you edit your garden? I edit all the time just by either keeping a plant the size as it is, or if something dies out or there's a space, then I put something else in, either the same or something related. And it's always a work of keeping it the right size and not letting things get overblown. That's why we prune, for one thing. Yeah. And pruning the climbers is important, keeping the pathway open and not having them, you know, do all of that. You come up with just a bushy bramble. Yeah. Pruning is necessary. And then I can redo pots now and then and things like that. Now, does this garden attract pollinators? And how did you add to that? Now, we talked about some other plants that you've added. Well, giving the biodiversity. Giving the biodiversity. And my portaires, I like to play around with different plants attracting pollinators, like the hummingbirds, you know, give them a tubular kind of flower. And then all, I have bees, ladybugs. I can see them all flying around behind you. Birds, birds every morning, evening, and during the day. And everybody's working on cleaning up the garden. So how do people react to your garden when they come here? Because this isn't a typical backyard landscape. Last year, when I had the wine and roses that we open our garden for, I invited my dentist and his wife because when I told my dentist that I had 300 roses, he went home and told his wife. And she said, is that the podcast that I saw from Green Acres? What? That's awesome. And she really wanted to come. And so he brought her and her sister. She looked at me like I was Taylor Swift. A little swifty, a little buddy. That's awesome. She came in and went, I love your garden. So it's fun when people really appreciate. Yeah. Really appreciate. It didn't happen overnight. Appreciate all of the, you know, the beauty and the work you've gone to. I think we're all a bit thirsty to see some beautiful things and to see abundance of life. And I love it. I think you created something very special here. Your yard here is just incredible. I mean, it's breathtaking. It's beautiful. What does this place mean to you? What does this space, how does it make you feel? And what do you think other people can take from it? You know, I hope other people take some of the tranquility and peace that I find here, but I find the garden is my therapy and my retreat. And it allows me just to breathe. And I found that even when I had 12 roses, 10 roses. So I hope other people find joy and relaxation in whatever plants they want to grow. But even if you have one rose in the pot, you're going to love it. You're just going to love it. And, you know, just the joy of seeing growth and beauty and the cycle of life, nature, the times of the year, the seasons. And every season is going to bring something. I love spring. Linda, I love it. I love you. I think you're amazing. This place is incredible. And I think it's going to inspire a lot of people to maybe dabble in creating their own paradise, their own oasis at their homes. I hope so. Because it doesn't have to be this grand or this huge. It can be a small, it can be a container. It can be. It can be a little part of your side yard. It really can. Maybe just injecting, maybe editing a few roses into that landscape. Yeah. So thank you so much for this. And I really appreciate what you've done here. Thank you so much, Kevin. It's been lovely talking to you.