Steve812's blog: Counting Roses

How many roses do you have? How many roses are in your garden? It seems like a simple enough question. I have two. Or fifteen. Or three hundred seventy eight. It's a number arrived at by counting. And who cannot do that?

I cannot. I will admit that part of my reason for not knowing the exact number is that I do not care. I care about individual roses. I care about how to cultivate each one well. I care about individual spots in the garden. I care about what the garden looks like and how to make the best of it. But I just do not care about exactly how many roses live in it.

The problem is a lot trickier than it might seem at first. Suppose a gardener has a brand new garden with no roses. Suppose that in 2012 he plants a single rose plant. By 2015 it is clear that the rose is a keeper; it makes blooms that please him and it grows satisfactorily without what he would consider an annoying amount of effort. He has no other roses growing in the garden and the idea of getting more has not yet occurred to him. At this point one might very reasonably assert that his garden contains one rose. Now in September 2016, suppose that a nursery that offers roses in pots pre-sells some of its inventory for the next year at a 50% discount. In September he ordes one more rose for delivery the third day in May the next year, 2016. Now, suppose that the rose will need to be grown on in a pot at least through September of 2017 before being planted in the garden. Suppose further that it will be impossible to know whether the rose is established in the garden until September 2017. At what point is the number of roses exactly 2? Is it when our gardener orders the second rose? That seems too early. He might own two roses, but the second one is not really in his garden. It is a rose of his in his garden in only in some theoretical sense. He has dibs on a rose and the actual plant may not be known to anyone, even if the cultivar is. So does the rose count it when it is taken out of the shipping box May 2016? Well, maybe. But the rose is not yet in the garden. What about after it is potted up and living in the garden? Well, in some technical sense it is a rose in the garden; but it is not established. It is not what realtors would call a fixture. So still, maybe not. What about when it is in the ground?

This brings up the question about how we count roses that are in the ground in the garden. Suppose we plant a rose on its own roots and it grows well but then disappears. We see nothing of it for two, three, or six years. Is it in the garden? Well, if it comes up sometime after this the answer would have to be, yes. it was still in the garden, even if it was invisible. Many rose gardeners who plant lots of roses on their own roots will have the experience of discovering that they once thought was dead is, years later, actually living the garden and blooming. Sometimes it will happen with the same rose every year. There is one rose at the edge of a path - it was put in before the path was there - that grows to six inches high and makes one very pretty bloom in my garden every year. Each fall I imagine it is dead. It has come back six years straight. Do I count it in the spring when I know it is alive? Do I fail to count it in the winter when it is hiding beneath the paving stones?

At any given point in time there are probably something like a dozen roses in my garden that face some very real existential threat. In some cases it's winter freezing or spring drought. In others its my inclination to move the rose. Maybe the rose is dying anyway. Maybe it doesn't bloom very well. Maybe it's a blackspot machine infecting dozens of roses around it. I go into the garden, see the rose, and know it is virtually doomed. I know I will move it. And I know that the chance of survival after being moved is close to zero. (I have a few roses that have undergone major relocation and lived to bloom again. In one case I started with one rose and ended up with two after the transplant was complete.) So there is a sense in which even though there is an actual plant there, soon there will not be one. The rose counts only in some technical definitional sense. Or as a placeholder. Not as a source of blooms of that type going forward into the future for five or twenty five years. If I were selling my house and it were the only rose in the garden, a prospective buyer might ask if the garden has roses. If I answered "no" it would be technically incorrect, but functionally true. If I answered "yes" it would be technically true but functionally deceiving. There simply is not a meaningful way to describe the rose's status without saying something like "Yes, but it is nothing but sharp thorns and blackspot and will be landfill in six weeks' time."

So it turns out that there are two problems in counting roses. The first is the physical act of counting actual plants in the garden. How does one count the ones that only exist as subterranean roots, for example? Or how does one know that a small rose is hiding beneath a bigger one? Or if two roses that are different cultivars are planted too close together what is to say that a novice will be able to distinguish them? And if a rose growing on its own roots is big enough to divide into several other plants ... in one sense it is one plant. But if one is in the business of dividing large plants and selling them, it is very close to being more than one. The second problem is one of definition. One might find it easy to answer the question about how many candles one might light on a menorah, but when it comes to answering the question about how many entities there are in the Holy Trinity, it's a little hard to say. One? Three? Both? Neither? The problem hinges on definitions. There were a few years during the dark ages when - it might seem - more sheep skins (parchment) were given to answering this question than to helping poor Europeans keep warm in winter. It's not an easy question to answer because the definitions are so tricky. In many senses counting roses an easier problem; but it's still one fraught with many definitional difficulties.

One of the most important definitions is the distinction between physical plants and cultivars. This is a relatively easy one because it is possible to agree on clear definitions; but it, too, might trip one up. When the membership director of the local gardening club was interviewing my wife about my garden she asked my wife "How many roses are there in Steve's garden?" And my wife, who knows as much about gardening as a two year old girl knows about flying fighter jets asked "Are you referring to plants or cultivars." At which point the membership coordinator's head exploded and she is now heading a different committee. Mostly, my garden contains just one of any cultivar. But there are five Mme Alfred Carrieres, six Pink Pets, three or four Europeanas, three Gourmet Popcorns, two or three South Africas, six Julia Childs and so on. I'm pretty sure the number of rose plants lodged in or near the garden exceeds 250. So if I have 256 plants, perhaps I have have 229 cultivars. Of which 14 plants and 11 cultivars exist in pots. More. Or Less.

Who can say? By this time next year the number will be a little different since some plants are on order. But unless I can learn more about keeping roses from being eaten by deer or rabbits outside the fenced part of the garden, the number probably will not get much bigger. Not that there is much reason to care. Fortunately, no sheep skins were consumed in the writing of this. Stay warm this winter. And have pleasant dreams of roses.

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