Photo by A Stradley.
Roses have been a beloved garden standard since antiquity. During the month of May, the Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden bursts to life with rose blossoms as well as all the other amazing plants installed in that space. Some of our visitors and volunteers express confusion about where to find our rose collection, or ask why we do not have one. In fact, there are over 35 different rose varieties planted in the Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden. These varieties represent some of the best roses on the market for hardiness, beauty, pest & disease resistance, and prolific blooming. Why, then, are visitors perplexed when they see our rose garden?
Traditionally, rose gardens have been planted in a very specific layout: rows of roses. They are usually grouped by type, like tea roses, climbing roses, or shrub roses. These designs can still be found at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, at Oprah’s house – but you won’t find that layout in our rose garden, at least not since 2020. Why did we change the formal standard format when it is so recognizable and beloved?
The answer is sustainability. A traditional rose garden is a great sucking sink for a gardener’s time, energy, money, and fretting. Deadheading and weeding daily, plus fertilizing, irrigating, and treating for pests and disease could keep a small army busy indefinitely. The chief flaw in this traditional layout is how easily and quickly Rosa species – and in fact the whole rose family – share diseases and pests. Some of the common problems include black spot, voracious beetles, fire blight, powdery mildew, and mites. It is the mites – specifically a microscopic eriophyid mite, Phyllocoptes fructiphilus – that spread the most recent rose ailment plaguing the horticulture world: the rose rosette virus.
In roses, the rose rosette virus (or rose rosette disease) generates dense, localized growth (called a rosette or witch’s broom) with excessive thorniness, flower distortion, thickened stems, discoloration, and increased vulnerability to other pests and pathogens. The mites, being so very small, easily move from one infected plant to the next. They are carried on the wind, on clothing, on pruning tools, and when one rose brushes against another. As you might imagine, the likelihood of mites spreading is extremely high in a traditional design of rows of roses. There is currently no cure for the virus, no rose that is immune, and pruning out affected branches has little to no effect. If a gardener is dedicated to servicing roses and doing nothing else, they might have some luck with the application of miticides, monthly applications of horticultural oil, irrigation, regularly pruning, careful removal of all pruned debris, and treatment with dormant oil in the winter. And this gargantuan effort may not even help at all.
A rose exhibiting normal growth (left) and excessive growth due to rose rosette disease (right), by A. Stradley.
A rose exhibiting severe rose rosette disease symptoms, by A Stradley.
The horticulturists here at Duke Gardens needed a better answer. In 2020, curator Mike Owens and his team set out to reimagine what it means to have a rose garden. One of the advantages he had in his design process is that roses are the only known host for both the mites and the virus they carry. He and his team removed every rose in our rose collection, and created a new design that combined roses with a variety of plants that are explicitly not roses, to serve as barriers for pests and pathogens, and to provide year-round interest when the roses are not in bloom.
Now throughout our redesigned rose garden, you’ll see hardy perennials and shrubs that create a matrix of exotic textures and harmonious colors that create year-round interest. These companion plantings not only extend the season of interest, but they also disguise pockets of the garden where a rose plant may have been removed and replanted due to rosette. This garden can become quite hot in the summer and all the selected plants perform well in hot, dry conditions and, may also intercept eriophyid mites being blown on the wind. Tall, tree-like yucca’s and windmill palms add architectural height and carry the eye upward. Rigid agave add foliar color and exotic texture and are extremely drought tolerant. Native plants like amsonia, coneflower, baptisia, and penstemon fill in the remaining spaces and extend the seasonal color display.
Happily, this kind of dense, mixed planting is very beautiful not only to people but also pollinators. Many different types of insects can be found in this garden. The Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden promotes plant health, reduces inputs, needs no irrigation, and stands as a demonstration that sustainable gardening can be gorgeous and still satisfy our affinity for beloved traditional plants like roses.
A diverse mixed border in the Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden in May 2026, featuring a disease-resistant hybrid musk rose (Rosa ‘Buff Beauty’).