TO: Retail Nursery Personnel, Commercial Growers, and Landscape PersonnelAcross Texas
FROM: Horticultural Specialists with the TexasA&MAgriLife Extension Service
DATE: April 13, 2024
SUBJECT: Coordinated Educational and MarketingAssistance Campaigns Featuring Newly Designated Earth-Kind® Roses
We have excellent marketing assistance news for you!
Over the next few years, we will be providing statewide coordinated educational and marketing assistance campaigns on our newly designated Earth-Kind® Roses, whereby we simultaneously provide:
• Valuable horticultural education for the public
• Marketing assistance for Green Industry members across Texas
To increase consumer awareness, educational campaigns featuring the newly designated EarthKind® Roses will be provided over three successive years Please see the attached schedule for a comprehensive overview of campaign details including listing of featured cultivars, dates the campaigns will launch, etc.
To give the industry as much time to prepare as possible, these campaigns will not begin until Spring, 2025.
Selection of these newly designated Earth-Kind® Roses was made by TexasA&MAgriLife Extension Service Horticulturists based on results from two multiyear research studies conducted in the alkaline, clay soils of northwest Dallas.
These two labor-intensive research studies required 8.5 years to complete. Results of these studies have been published in HortTechnology, a highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journal for applied horticultural research. Of the 98 highly regarded rose cultivars evaluated in these studies, only 15 cultivars met our very high standards for Earth-Kind® designation.
To assess the ability of these roses to perform under very challenging, low-input conditions, these plants were never fertilized, never sprayed with any fungicide or other pesticides, and after the initial year of establishment, supplemental irrigation was reduced by 70%. For reference, under normal rainfall conditions in Dallas, for rose exhibitors to keep old-style hybrid tea roses healthy would typically require 17 pesticide applications per growing season.
Bottom Line: These newly designated Earth-Kind® Roses will certainly be beautiful, lowmaintenance, and environmentally-friendly additions to our Texas landscapes.
These studies were made possible by a generous grant from the Houston Rose Society (with the strong leadership of Gaye Hammond) and we are profoundly grateful for their support. We also wish to thank Dr. Derald Harp, Professor of Horticulture at TexasA&M UniversityCommerce, for his outstanding contributions as a research scientist on these studies.
Please remember that to be Earth-Kind® , a rose cultivar must be:
• Designated as such by TexasA&MAgriLife Extension
• Grown on its own roots (i.e., not grafted)
Paul Winski is already hard at work developing effective point-of-purchase materials which you may purchase that should spur sales at retail For your convenience, Paul’s contact information is listed at the end of this letter.
We also want these campaigns to be profitable for your business.
To inform growers and give them as much time as possible to increase their production of these featured roses, we have attached a detailed schedule of the three yearly campaigns, a schedule in which we are, by design, featuring the most available cultivars the first year, the next most available the second year, and the least available the final year.
We spent a great deal of time locating as many nurseries as possible that are growing these outstanding roses, but there are two beautiful cultivars, ‘Lena’and ‘Ole’ (https://mnhardy.umn.edu/roses) for which we have not been able to find any commercial growers that service this area of the United States. If you are interested in growing these cultivars (and we hope that you are), please contact Paul Winski for information on where you might be able to purchase cuttings. These two high-performance cultivars represent new marketing opportunities for our Texas growers!
Prior to each year’s campaign, we will provide a brief description and image of each rose for you to use in your customer outreach efforts.
Campaigns will be launched on the first weekend inApril each year across most of the state Date for launch of these campaigns was selected based on advice from a number of highly respected industry leaders from around the state
For areas of the state in which Spring may arrive earlier or later (e.g., Brownsville,Amarillo), we suggest that retail nurseries coordinate with their growers, then with their County Extension Agent, to select the best time to launch these campaigns in their area.
We in Extension will be doing everything we can to generate as much coverage of these campaigns as possible in both the mass media and social media, but we suggest that individual nurseries also provide marketing information on these roses to their customers via newsletters, email blasts, text messages, etc.
Since these research studies were conducted in north-central Texas, we can highly recommend these newly designated Earth-Kind® Roses for use in north-central and central Texas. But in order to not exceed the geographic validity of our research findings, we can only suggest these cultivars for trial plantings in other areas of Texas.
Based on observations made in conjunction with these two research studies, it appears that, while very beautiful and easy to grow, these featured cultivars are not resistant to rose rosette disease in our area. This is not unexpected, however, because almost no commercial roses have demonstrated immunity to this disease
So before purchasing any roses, we will urge consumers to contact their County ExtensionAgent or a local Texas Master Certified Nursery Professional for information regarding the current status of rose rosette disease in their particular area of the state.
We greatly appreciate the assistance of PresidentAmy Graham and her staff at the Texas Nursery & LandscapeAssociation (TNLA) in distributing this and subsequent messages to retailers, growers, and landscape personnel across the state. We at TexasA&MAgriLife Extension Horticulture are indeed fortunate to get to work with TNLA personnel on these important campaigns.
If you have any suggestions or questions regarding these campaigns, please contact Paul Winski
We certainly hope that you will find these campaigns to be beneficial to your business!
Sincerely,
Steven George, Ph.D.
Paul Winski, M.S.
Professor and Extension Program Specialist - Commercial Earth-Kind® Specialist Horticulture/Green Industry
National Coordinator of the Department of Horticultural Sciences Earth-Kind® Rose Program
Texas A&MAgriLife Extension Department of Horticultural Sciences Ph: 979.314.8047
Texas A&MAgriLife Extension
Email: paul.winski@ag.tamu.edu