Farm News, IA
06-29-07
Everything is coming up roses
By Darcy Dougherty Maulsby, Farm news staff
FARM NEWS/DARCY DAUGHTERY MAULSBY
Ruby Buck, widow of Dr. Griffith Buck, says her husband was ahead of his time in anticipating modern gardeners' desire for low-maintenance roses. Many Buck
Roses can be seen at Reiman Gardens in Ames.
While low-maintenance, easy-care plants have become perennial favorites with today’s time-crunched gardeners,
Iowa State University researcher Dr. Griffith
Buck (1915-1991) was ahead of his time when he began developing cold-hardy roses nearly 60 years ago. Buck, who believed roses should be as easy to grow as dandelions, hybridized roses that didn’t need spraying or winter protection but produced the breathtaking blooms that Midwestern gardeners admired in hybrid tea roses.
“He wanted roses for the common man,” said Buck’s widow, Ruby, 90, who still lives in Ames.
During Buck’s nearly 40 years at ISU, he hybridized nearly 90 rose varieties, including many that are displayed at Reiman Gardens in Ames. Although ISU discontinued rose hybridizing following Buck’s retirement in 1985, researchers and growers in Iowa, Minnesota, South Carolina and Texas have cooperated to continue the work he began and have introduced six additional cultivars. Plant breeders and gardeners are now rediscovering Buck’s legacy as the demand for environmentally-responsible roses offering high levels of disease and insect resistance continues to grow.
“Grif’s research is very important to anyone who grows roses, and his work wasn’t really appreciated until after he was gone,” said
Nick Howell, superintendent of the ISU Horticulture Research Station and a former student of Buck’s. “While roses are very difficult to grow in Iowa, Grif was dedicated to developing lowcare shrub roses that could thrive here.”
Pen pal sprouts a lifelong passion
Buck, who grew up on a farm in Appanoose County, always credited his interest in roses to a series of letters he exchanged with the famous Spanish rose grower
Pedro Dot. The letters came from Dot’s niece, Maria Antonia, as part of Buck’s high school Spanish class assignment to find a pen pal. Each letter from Spain would include a comment or question from Dot about growing and hybridizing roses. “I had to learn about roses to answer those letters,” later recalled Buck, a

1932 high school graduate who continued to correspond with his pen pal until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
After teaching country school and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II,
Buck enrolled at Iowa State and earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in horticulture. The Iowa State horticulture department that Buck joined in 1949 maintained a distinguished rose hybridizing history dating back to the 1870s.
Building on his predecessors’ work, Buck used the traditional hybridizing method of transferring pollen from one rose to another. Ironically, he became allergic to rose pollen.
“When the doctors told Grif he’d have to change his hobby, he said, ‘I can’t it’s my life’s work,’” recalled Ruby Buck, who noted that her husband had to get shots regularly for as long as he worked with roses.
Friends and rural Iowa inspired the creative names of many of Buck’s hardy new roses, including: n Barn Dance. “One of the directions I took in choosing names for my roses was to pick names that were appropriate to all the Corn Belt rural pleasures,” Buck once noted. n Dorcas. “Dorcas was a television reporter on our college television station,”
Buck recalled. “Every noon she would have an interview program. Since I enjoyed being on her program, I named a rose for her.” n Prairie Sunset. This rose changes color as it opens and finishes red.
Buck often sent roses to family and friends, not just in Iowa but across the country. Today the search continues for a number of missing Buck cultivars, including Red Sparkler (a hybrid tea with 4-inch blooms of dark wine red),
Andante (a salmon-pink shrub rose), Cantabile (a light pink shrub rose), Pizzicato
(a light pink shrub with slightly-cupped, salmon-rose blooms), Prairie Heritage
(an orange-pink shrub rose with blooms that become tinted with orange-gold as the flowers age), Polka Time (an orange-pink shrub rose with salmon-tinted, yellow-veined, flamingopink petals), Kissin’ Cousin (a shrub rose with clusters of coral pink buds whose blooms develop orange-pink tones with age), Paraglider
(a shrub rose with 4inch blooms of orange pink) and Pippa’s Song (a medium pink shrub with abundant, leathery foliage).
If you have any of these roses, you are urged to contact Teresa McLaughlin at
Reiman Gardens at (515) 294-2710.