 New York Rose Garden Looks to Pesticide-Free Future
The New York Botanical Rose Garden is developing unique hybrid roses that will bloom all summer long. And best of all, the flowers dont need pesticides. The New York Botanical Rose Garden wants to stop spraying pesticides on its flowers by developing disease-resistant hybrids. Currently, 53 percent of the flowers in the garden are pesticide free. [Peter Kukielski, Curator, New York Botanical Rose Garden] Today we can say that we have 3675 plants and essentially half of those are genetically and specifically hybridized to be disease resistant, therefore we are not going to spray them. Roses were once genetically designed to resist disease, but gardeners who crossed genetics to create new ones altered the plants resistance. To maintain the new hybrids, chemicals were created to prevent disease and deterioration. [Peter Kukielski, Curator, New York Botanical Rose Garden] When this garden opened in 1988, it was a collection of roses. It was a collection of roses that were available at the time. I have to say with that and the definition of that is that roses at that time were generally known to be chemically-dependant plants. But in 2007, curator Peter Kukielski began to overhaul the entire collection, selecting unique rose hybrids that were created to exist in natural elements. The Apricot Mother of Pearl and Solero Yellow hybrids are among the most successful. [Peter Kukielski, Curator, New York Botanical Rose Garden] ...
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