The sweat bee circled the perimeter, casing the rosey joint before nose-diving into the outer layer. Finding nothing, he tried a different tack, going around the bend into adjacent petals. Coming up short again, he reappeared head first and ascended the protective border of the inner circle.
Just a few steps from the anthers, he was on the verge of finally reaching his destination. But the flower remained stubbornly closed to visitors, and my friend flew off on an empty stomach.
The scene was akin to watching a child trying to open a child-proof container, but it wasn’t entirely a surprise. The bee’s chosen restaurant was a Knockout rose, bred for its hardiness, disease resistance, long bloom times, and just about everything else that humans desire but bees don’t give a damn about.
If there’d been a Yelp category for bee-friendly establishments, the dejected rose visitor would have found reviews from other pollinators with similar experiences. And he would have steered clear of this unwelcoming hedge and instead joined the hoverfly dining on my new patch of pollinator-friendly native Virginia roses in our backyard.
A rose by any other name, it turns out, is sometimes not so sweet at all when gardening for wildlife. Many modern and highly cultivated types provide little for our animal friends, their shapes and colors and structures so altered as to make finding food an exercise in frustration. In short, these manicured flowers may be a convenient and over-the-top feast for our human eyes, but they often fail to nourish our fellow species.
Introduced with much fanfare in 2000, the same year my husband and I moved to our 2-acre property, the Knockout line once seemed like the perfect plant for a flower lover who’d been raised with a healthy fear of unhealthy roses. My pragmatic mom had occasionally expressed a quiet longing for the voluptuous blooms, but always with a note of regret about how difficult they were to grow. My plant scientist dad acknowledged the otherworldly aspect of roses but preferred species that required far less coddling.
My parents are from Portland, Oregon, where seemingly anything grows and entire festivals are devoted to celebrating the ancient floral symbol of love and death and regret. But they settled near Washington, D.C., a region with its own kind of lushness that hasn’t forgotten its muggy wetland roots and powdery mildew-filled, black-spot-tainted atmosphere. It’s great for some plants—like those that evolved here and thrive on the humidity—but not so accommodating of flowery fussbudgetry meant for cooler-headed climates.
Which is why much of America—its median strips, its parking lots, its storefronts and libraries and post offices and parks—ended up with ubiquitous hedges of the flamboyant and seemingly carefree Knockouts. In our own space, they quickly became a centerpiece of our front yard, needing nothing from me but a little water in the beginning and a lot of admiration in successive years. Even a vole who cut them off at the knees with his teeth didn’t manage to do any permanent damage.
They were roses that could stand on their own, without support from toxic chemicals, and that was why I’d bought them. What was not to love?
Over the years, though, I realized that the only other creatures who shared these affections were my one-time vole visitors. As I watched sparrows eat the seeds of the switchgrasses I’d planted nearby and bees collect pollen from the wild senna that volunteered between the bushes, I was dismayed to realize that, in spite of their gregarious-looking ways, these roses were at heart a very lonely species.
This year, as the Knockouts nearly succumbed to either extreme cold or the rose rosette disease virus that’s now known to attack them—possibly a combination of both—we cut the dead branches back to the ground and made way for more senna and switchgrasses to take over. And I went on a mission to find roses that were meant to be here. Planted two weeks ago on a gentle dry slope in our backyard, the five Rosa virginianas are already thriving. Native to much of the eastern United States, they aren’t just disease-resistant and beautiful throughout the year; they also provide nectar and pollen for native bees and other pollinators, nutrient-rich hips and cover for birds and mammals, and foliage for caterpillars and leaf-cutter bees.
Though we’ve been trained to think of the fluffy-bloomed peacocks of the rose world as the most exquisite, to my eyes there’s something much bolder about our single-petaled native roses. Unapologetically baring all their reproductive parts, the flowers’ contrasts of pink and yellow beckon animals to come feed. And when the animals respond, it’s clear that flora and fauna are old friends who know precisely what to do when they meet again. Like any good host, the flower offers its tasty treats in just the right-sized cup for the tongues of its visitors, who return the favor with the gift of pollination.
The next time I visit my new Virginia rose patch, I hope to find Mr. Sweat Bee and his friends there, enjoying themselves at the open bar instead of wasting their time on roses that refuse to serve their kind. Those plants are manmade constructs that have little to do with the needs of the natural world. I don’t blame people for not knowing this; it took me years to figure it out. But once you know, you can’t un-know, nor should you try. The plants and animals have taught us that lesson over and over again. It’s our job now, as fellow citizens of this beautiful but degraded planet, to stop ignoring them, start turning down the volume on all the marketing ploys that encourage us to carry on ignorantly in our human-centric ways, and act in the best interests of all species. It’s not hard. We just have to restore our humility enough to follow their lead—to whichever flowers they take us to.
