Roses In The Pollinator Garden, featuring the American Pillar Rose

Hi, good morning. This is Laura Dickinson, Consulting Rosarian at the Kansas City Rose Society. We're in the Laura Conyers-Smith Rose Garden at Luce Park in Kansas City at the 51st and Warnall. And today I'm standing next to a rose full of blooms and it's covered with bees. Bees are everywhere flying around through these roses. And so I wanted to talk for a minute about attracting bees to your garden with roses. A lot of people are interested in pollinator gardens, and so I want you to know that roses fit perfectly in a pollinator garden because roses are naturally pollinated by insects. If you go to a rose garden on a sunny day, you'll see all kinds of bees and flies and small little insects in these roses eating the pollen and the nectar from these roses. For a good pollinator garden, the best roses are ones like these that have open faces so that you can see the stamens. See there's a yellow part in the middle, that's what the bees and insects are after. So if you have a rose with an open center like this, you'll get more insects. Other roses that have more petals and are more full and closed up aren't as interesting to the bees because they can't see their source of food. So I always tell people if you can't see the stamens, the bees can't either. The other thing to remember if you're going to have roses in your garden is that you have to buy the kind that you don't have to spray with insecticides because you don't want to kill the pollinators that you've drawn in to your roses. So when you're choosing roses for your pollinator garden be sure you read the tags and do your research and find roses that are listed as disease resistant and then if they do get a little bit of disease know that you're just going to have to live with it and wait for it to go away. So looking for pollinator garden roses is easy. Just do your research and find a rose that fits the color and the shape and size that you want and has a beautiful open face for the bees.