What’s a growing trend for 2014? Restoring and sowing “balance” in life – and the garden, according to the Garden Media Group.

While to some that may mean practicing yoga near the euonymus, to many it also means making more thoughtful choices for this year and beyond.

Homeowners still want their outdoor spaces to look beautiful – lush plants, inviting furniture, chic accessories – but they also want to invest their time and money into high-quality, eco-friendly products with a smaller carbon footprint, the group reports.

And they want that outdoor space to do double duty – a place for solitude but also for socializing. Balance, remember?

Among the gardening trends highlighted by the group:

• Composting: Recycling food scraps to create compost is the new recycling.

• Growing fruit: There’s much interest in planting things like raspberries and blueberries for crafting cocktails and smoothies, hops for home-brewing and grapes for homemade wine.

• Bee-friendly gardening: Environmentally aware consumers are interested in planting native, pollen-rich flowers, trees and vegetables to provide safe shelters.

• “Fingertip” gardening: Gardens are going high-tech with mobile apps and technology. Suntory Flowers’ Virtual Container Designer app is one example.

Locally, Jeffrey Salmon noted another interesting trend in landscaping: Homeowners are requesting smaller flowering trees – patio-size trees – rather than big shade trees.

“People want to keep the sun in the yard,” said Salmon, president of Arbordale Nurseries Landscaping, 480 Dodge Road, Getzville.

Other landscape trends: Planting edibles into the landscape – using blueberries as a landscape foundation plant, for example. Salmon also noted a decline in plastic edging. It’s being replaced by natural products – perhaps local stones from places such as Medina. People want local, natural products, he said. Plants, stones, mulch.

“I think Buffalo people have accepted that we don’t need to truck the mulch from five states over. We can use the stuff here,” Salmon said.

Miniature fairy gardens continue to be hugely popular. And water gardens are evolving and maturing – with homeowners putting more thought into their placement and maintenance.

“People want them to be easier to care for,” Salmon said.

As for flowers, “I think tropicals are going to be a big deal again this year. Mandevilla seems to be one of the hot plants; it has been the last couple years, and it is again this year,” said Mark Yadon of Mischler’s Florist and Greenhouses, 118 S. Forest Road, Williamsville.

Container gardening also remains a popular option – including ready-made.

“You will see a lot of multiple types of plants – maybe three different plants – in one container, which makes it easy. You can just take that combination and pop two or three of them into a window box and instantly be done. Or put it into a basket or container of your own, and you have it already mixed for you,” Yadon said.

“We’re finding that more people want stuff done for them. We’re selling a lot more mixed containers that are ready to go out the door rather than people buying their own components and making the container themselves,” Yadon said.

“It’s big. It’s instant. It’s now,” he said.

email: smartin@buffnews.com

Which rose?

In Colorado, where the stunning landscape is also challenging and water consumption is a perennial concern, knowing which roses will fare well with the least amount of water can be the best way to narrow the field

People assume that all roses take a lot of water but the truth is that a lot of the species roses, as well as a lot of the modern shrub roses, really require less water than traditional hybrid tea roses, says Matt Douglas, owner of Denver’s High Country Roses.

“Many roses, primarily the species roses, can be incorporated into landscaping in nearly xeric conditions,” he says. “These include the Rosa glauca and the Rosa woodsii. The drought-resistant woodsii is not considered the most beautiful, but it fits the bill for low water needs.”

His personal favorite is Rosa glauca, or redleaf rose.

“It’s a fantastic shrub; once a year it blossoms with tiny pink buds,” Douglas says. “It can grow up to 6 feet and will survive in nearly waterless conditions once established.” A similar rose is the Austrian copper, which produces an orange flower, blooms once a year, and does well in this climate.

Rosa glauca also is a designated rose for Plant Select, the cooperative program administered by Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University in concert with horticulturists and nurseries throughout the Rocky Mountain region and beyond. Plant Select (plantselect.org ) identifies and distributes the best plants for landscapes and gardens from the intermountain region to the high plains.

“This is a great resource for anyone who wants to identify plants that will thrive here,” Douglas says. Another Plant Select-designated rosebush is “Ruby Voodoo.” It’s “a double-bloom, very fragrant, modern hybrid that is a good choice for a first-time rose gardener,” Douglas says.

For history lovers, High Country’s repertoire includes five varieties of Fairmount roses. These are roses found in east Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery and propagated about 20 years ago. At its 1890 founding, Fairmount (fairmountheritagefoundation.org) was the largest developed landscape of its time west of the Mississippi.

These rose varieties, known for their wonderful fragrances and beautiful hips in fall, include the Ghislaine de Féligonde, an old-fashioned rambler that forms a large shrub with few thorns. It blooms in apricot and ages into a pale yellow. The highly popular Fairmount Red, closely related to a hybrid perpetual, blooms in crimson magenta with cabbage-style blooms. And the Fairmount Proserpine, of unknown origins, offers a deep fuchsia double bloom with a tight knob of center petals.

Both the Jeremiah Pink and JoAn’s Pink Perpetual live up to their names with gorgeous pink blooms. JoAn’s is a repeat bloomer, growing up to six feet tall.

“Old Garden Roses are classified as those that existed before 1867 and are known for their hardiness and fragrance,” says Patricia Carmody, executive director of the Fairmount Heritage Foundation. “We know that landscape architect/Fairmount Cemetery designer Reinhard Schuetze planted 380 roses of all kinds in 1891, the first year of planting at Fairmount. A lot of other roses were planted by families and took over some of the monuments, so we divided some and moved them to our Rose Garden/Gazebo area.”

The Fairmount Arboretum houses one of the largest known collections of Old Garden Roses in North America.

“We have 400 rose bushes here, many of which still need to be identified,” said Carmody. “Some have study names given to them from a survey done in the 1990s. One rose is called the Mae Fair, found planted next to the grave of a woman named Mae Fair.

Fairmount’s goal is to propagate more of the roses found on its grounds to preserve their genetics. Funds from its rose sales, and its upcoming tour in June, will go toward that project.

And the tour should be a barn-burner this year, Carmody said. “With all the moisture we received this past winter, everything is really popping.”

Grow with the (low) flow

If you really want to grow without much water, buy a rose that blooms only once in the spring, when moisture is at its highest, advises Sharron Zaun, a Boulder gardener and member of the Rose Society. “After it blooms, you can enjoy it as a shrub.”

Old garden roses are good choices, she says; try Banshee, which is very tall and exceedingly fragrant with pink, double blooms, and purple fall foliage. Other good, tough choices:
Rosa arkanasas and Rosa hugonis, a.k.a. the Father Hugo rose, a once-blooming, extremely hardy plant with yellow blooms.

“These species roses occur in the wild, all over the world,” Zaun says. “We have native roses in Colorado, along the streams, and we have taken these species to breed.”

All roses will grow in Colorado’s clay soils, but they do like good drainage, she notes. “Add an organic material such as compost to nourish your roses and help them retain water. Consider planting them in raised beds, which also helps with drainage.” For the best results, she says, choose a rose bush that is on its own roots, not a grafted rose.

And remember to think roses beyond the growing and blooming season. One of the reasons Rosa glauca is so prized is that after the bloom, its silvery red foliage is lovely all summer long. The hips — where a rose holds its seeds — are orange.

“I can look out my bedroom window in the middle of November and see these orange hips against the gray landscape, and it’s beautiful,” Douglas says.

How to move a rose

A garden is an ever-changing work of art. Trees grow taller and provide more shade. A neighbor puts on an addition that makes your favorite rose struggle for sun. Or you want to relocate a rose to where its charms can be more easily enjoyed.

Loddie Dolinski, a senior horticulturalist for the Denver Botanic Gardens, who is in charge of moving several roses to a new rose ellipse garden, has felt your thorny dilemma. Here’s her advice on how to move a rose.

The best time is very early spring. But Dolinski knows that you can’t always do it at the best time. If you can’t, do it in the best way.

First, cut the rose back. “Down to about a foot tall is best,” she says.

Dig up as much of the root ball as you can, slowly and gently, with the soil fairly moist so the job is easier. Pot up your cut-back, dug-up rose with good, fresh potting soil. If the roots are too large to fit in the pot, you can prune them back so that they’ll fit easier and won’t be damaged (a clean cut is better than a bad scrape).

Store your potted rose on the north side of a building to minimize temperature fluctuation. Water and check on it frequently; pots can dry out fast, especially in drying winds.

In the new location, dig a hole at least twice as wide as the root ball. Plant at the same depth as in the original location or an inch deeper. Dolinski says don’t go overboard on amending the soil in the new location, but do be sure to place a graft two inches below the soil surface. Water well; then put a layer of mulch or compost on top (not touching the canes).

Keep an eye on it until it sprouts new leaves. If shoots come from below the graft, prune them out.

Susan Clotfelter, The Denver Post

Rose-growing primer

Matt Douglas of High Country Roses serves up his best tricks for keeping your roses in tiptop shape:

The nation’s largest landscape services business, ValleyCrest Cos. of Calabasas, has agreed to merge with another industry giant, Brickman Group Ltd. of Maryland.

The new company, which has yet to be named, will be a landscaping behemoth with more than 22,000 employees and annual revenue of about $2 billion.

Each serves large-scale clients such as corporations, universities, hospitals, housing communities, hotels and resorts. They also landscape and maintain parks and other grounds for public entities.

The transaction is expected to close by the middle of the year. Upon completion, Kerin will be chief executive of the new company. Roger Zino, now chief executive of ValleyCrest, will be vice chairman.

ValleyCrest is dominant in California and Florida, Zino said, whereas Brickman was established and grew biggest in the Northeast and Midwest. The two companies do compete in some of the same markets, however.

“We have known and respected one another for many years,” Zino said, “and have always shared a commitment to superior customer service, a relentless focus on employee safety and support of the environment and communities in which we live and work.”

Brickman is currently owned by New York private equity firm KKR, and ValleyCrest is currently owned by affiliates of MSD Capital, the investment vehicle for computer magnate Michael Dell and his family.

After the merger, KKR will have majority ownership of the combined company and MSD Capital will retain a significant minority ownership interest. The new company will maintain offices in Calabasas and Rockville, Md., Zino said.

ValleyCrest was co-founded in 1949 by Burton Sperber, who was still active as chairman of the company when he died in 2011.

Sperber had a passion for horticulture and preferred to be called “head gardener” even as his company grew into a national firm.

Benefiting from the post-World War II building boom in Southern California, Sperber’s privately held company grew steadily as it did landscaping for residential developments, schools and freeways.

What initially began as a small nursery with three employees had grown to more than 150 locations around the world, with 9,000 employees and nearly $835 million in annual revenue at the time of his death.

ValleyCrest did work at the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles, the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Florida and Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

roger.vincent@latimes.com

Twitter: @rogervincent

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