Her life is beds of roses
This is one in a series of occasional reports about South Florida gardens.
Barbara LaPradd likes to wake up and smell the roses. Later in the day, the sun’s heat will burn off the flowers’ aromatic oils and their aromas will evaporate.
But now, in the gentle heat of a winter morning, she can enjoy the fragrance of lemons, the scent of black licorice and even a hint of guava.
“If a rose doesn’t give off a scent, it’s not for me. I love their fragrance,” LaPradd says.
On her 1 ½-acre property in Princeton, she cultivates about 40 rose bushes, many of which bloom year round. Some are Old Garden or Antique Roses, which are classes of roses available before 1867. That’s when the first hybrid tea rose, La France, came into being and changed the floral landscape with its well-shaped buds and long straight stems.
“I’m turned off by hybrid tea roses because their stiff form makes them look very formal, and they don’t have much fragrance,” LaPradd says.
She prefers the older varieties with their full blooms, soft colors and variety of scents that hark back to another era. “I never expected to feel so passionate about them,” she says.
LaPradd likes the fact that they “don’t need spraying, fertilizing or coddling.” In fact, she says, “the only thing I have to do every day is smell them.”
That’s because they are less susceptible to problems such as aphids, thrips, powdery mildew, mold, rust and leaf mites than some of the newer ones. And these older roses, when grafted onto the Fortuniana rootstock, do particularly well in South Florida because the roots are resistant to nematodes.
Although LaPradd grew up in Homestead helping to weed her father’s vegetable garden, she didn’t get bitten by the growing bug until 1992.
That’s when she was working in a dentist’s office answering the phones. Between calls, she read a Modern Maturity magazine in which she found an article about growing Old Garden Roses.
“I had been intimidated by roses. But the article made it seem that anyone could grow them,” she says. Beautiful photographs of colorful blooms showed her the possibilities.
“That was it for me,” she says. She went through catalogs and ordered 10 different roses including the Marechal Niel that she knew her mother admired in a neighbor’s yard. She planted them in her garden.
All was going well until Hurricane Andrew struck. In fact, the storm pulled one of her roses out of the ground and, although she looked for it, she never found it. “It’s probably in the Caribbean by now,” she laughs.
But that didn’t stop her. By trial and error she filled her yard with blooms. “I’m a big pink fan. If a rose is pink and fragrant, I buy it,” she says.
When she married in 2004 and moved to her husband’s home in Princeton, she brought along about 20 bushes from her former garden. And she has added others.
Over the years, some have survived; others have died and had to be replaced. But she remains enchanted by each and every rose she lovingly tends.
“Asking me to pick a favorite rose is like asking me to pick my favorite breath of air,” she says.
Join her in her garden and she’s quick to point out her Blumenschmidt roses with petals that initially are pale yellow. But as the rose basks in the sun, the edges of the petals blush pink. The flowers have a fragrance she describes as “sweet with zing.” And the buds open year round.