The Lost AARS Test Garden

One day, one of our volunteers, Judy, was taking a walk in the neighborhood behind the nursery. A neighbor, Bill, told Judy that he was retiring and moving to Truckee. (Bill had taken care of the nursery's truck and vehicles.) Bill told her that he had been taking care of the nursery's rose garden for 48 years and he thought she should know that he wouldn't be doing that any longer.

Bruce Roeding confirmed that this rose garden was in fact the nursery's old AARS rose test garden. Bruce did not know what was planted there. He said that every year at the American Association of Nurserymen there was a meeting to report on the AARS rose trials at your location.

The contestant roses would probably have been numbered or lettered, but not named. We found no tags.

We tried to maintain the garden for a summer, but it was too hard.

At some point, we realized that in this lost rose garden would have the winners of the AARS trials. Even better was, however, that it would have the LOSERS! Those roses would have been deemed good enough to go through a rose trial, but perhaps it did not do as well in both Maine or Texas as it should have. The AARS roses probably can be obtained today, but possibly not the losers of the trial.

We moved the test garden to the "Rose Hospital" in the front of the park and put up a sign to suggest that there was something wrong with these special roses. We hoped that this sign would prevent people from pinching these roses.

Thanks to Tom Bonfigli, we have some identified. Others are stump-the-expert roses.

Note on the "Rose Hospital": Periodically people like to remove roses from their beds and (we hope) that they enjoy all of the rose pests that we have in the garden - rose curculio weevil and the Devil Bulb and more - as much as we do.

What was the AARS Program?

The All-America Rose Selections program (AARS) ran from 1940 until recently, 2013. Each year roses were selected to carry the AARS label as assurance that the rose performed well in all of the U.S. Look up roses that won from 1940 until 2013.

A new program, American Garden Rose Selections, has taken its place. The first AGRS roses were announced in 2016.

The California Nursery Company even entered one of its rose introductions, "Darling", as an AARS rose contestant. This rose was bred by C.A. Taylor and introduced in 1958. It did not make the cut and the nursery missed out on the $500,000 awarded to the winner (BR). 'Darling' seems to be lost to us with its raspberry fragrance and pink petals. Someone in Australia still grows it.