A Visionary's Dream
John was an air traffic controller in Portland, Oregon. I was secretary for a CPA in Portland but we met at an event at the Battle Ground Airport in Washington State. It was January of 1979 and he was being transferred to Medford Airport the next week. We got acquainted over dinner and he told me that he was an air traffic controller and a miniature rose grower. I had never heard of either. I had flown only once and had no concept of what it took to move airplanes around the earth. He asked me what were the most important things to me and I told him about my five children and my church. He was a big man weighing nearly 300 pounds. Something about a man of his size loving something as tiny as miniature roses intrigued me. So when he asked me out for a date the next Saturday I accepted. During the following week he sent flowers to my office almost every day. When he returned to Portland the next Saturday we had a very extended lunch at Bob's Big Boy on 82nd avenue in Portland. The topic of conversation was his dreams for a rose nursery; we talked for hours about what he had done so far and what he hoped to do in the future. My creative abilities were stirred as he talked so passionately about his dreams. Here was a man who could make decisions and had purpose. I wanted to help him make his dreams come true. The day had to end though and he returned to Medford. Eight days after we met he asked me to marry him and I accepted. He was never one to lose anytime when he knew what he wanted.
We were married six months later on July 21, 1979. I had two children still at home and we all moved to Medford. I was excited by his dreams of a rose business and so sold my house in Portland to fund it because I believed that together we could make it a success. He had been selling miniature roses for seven years as Small World Miniature Roses but since he also worked full time as an air traffic controller he couldn't devote enough time to it. I became the bookkeeper, propagator, shipper as well as making calls to potential customers. John and I, with my two children helping, built three large greenhouses on the property we bought near the airport.
John especially loved to water the roses because he could watch every change they experienced. When he came home from work he would immediately go out to the greenhouses and go to work taking cuttings or just tend the mini roses. He read everything he could get his hands on about miniature roses.
We put out a very simple black and white catalog; so simple that I drew the pictures for it. Later we added color and photographs. To save on expenses we collected large, discarded metal coffee cans for our stock plants. We sterilized them and punched drain holes in the bottom and used them until they rusted. Many were the scrapes and cuts we got from them so success brought plastic containers for which we were very thankful.
In those early days if company showed up unannounced they would have to follow us around the nursery to visit because we could not stop working. Sometimes we even put them to work. Our children have helped as well. Each of them spent time varying from days to years laboring with us sometimes as volunteers and sometimes as paid employees. Even the dog had to work. As an anniversary gift, John's daughter Laura gave us a female Labrador that we named Dolly. As we worked in the greenhouse labeling plants John would call out the names of the labels he needed. I would make the labels and put them in a paper bag for Dolly to take to him. Back and forth she happily carried her paper bag enjoying the praise she earned.
By 1982 we were the largest wholesale supplier of miniature roses in the northwest. That year we moved to Newberg, Oregon because the business had grown and shipping was more convenient from there. It was also closer to my parents and my children. We moved John's mother with us and soon his daughter returned from England to live with us. In 1984 John suffered a major heart attack and retired from his 28 year career as an air traffic controller. The next year we bought four and one half acres outside of the little town of St. Paul, Oregon, famous for their annual 4th of July Rodeo.
In 1987 we went to England and amongst many other places we visited David Austin's rose nursery in Shropshire, England. There we fell in love with the old garden roses and David Austin's strain of rose varieties. John stood in the middle of that garden and said "This is the way the United States is going to go and this is what we are going to do." Remember that he never lost anytime when he knew what he wanted. Immediately upon arriving home in Oregon we began to research the market to learn what rosarians might want. We learned that people wanted virus-free roses. We knew that miniature roses had never had virus because they had always been grown on their own roots and that grafting onto diseased root stock could transmit the disease. We also knew that grown on their own roots most roses would thrive. So virus-free and own-root was the way to go.
We tested and tested roses and found that most roses from Europe had not yet been exposed to virus so for many years we imported hundreds of varieties. We opened Heirloom Old Garden Roses in 1990. John spent 18 months getting a license from Wayside, who had the U.S. license to grow the Austin roses. We were one of the first three U.S. nurseries to offer them. The other two were Jackson and Perkins and Wayside. John sent me on many trips to Europe, with Bill Grant who led the tours, while he stayed home to operate the nursery. My job was to find varieties that had gone out of commerce or were new to the United States I lugged a heavy film camera and equipment everywhere and we built up a huge stock of photographs. We worked together on the catalog. He wrote the descriptions and I did the editing and typing and laid out the catalog. Over the years we added other types of roses to our offerings as the trends and tastes of the customer changed. Heirloom Roses has steadily grown since those first years. In 2000 we added another twenty-six acres and now have thirty-three greenhouses full of roses and five acres of rose display gardens which draw visitors from all over the world
I don't know for sure that we were the first to put Griffith Buck's roses on the market but I know we were one of the earliest. In 1981 we went to Iowa State University to observe the Buck Roses because John believed they were going to have an impact on the industry. This was before we became Heirloom Roses and were still operating as a wholesale miniature rose nursery. John's keen sense of vision saw these roses as an answer to questions rose gardeners were asking: Are they disease resistant? Are they cold hardy? John contacted Mary Buck who sent us the first cuttings and John voluntarily paid royalties to her on the sale of her husband roses as a gesture of respect. We were first able to include them in our 1994 catalog where we listed 17 of them. Dr. Griffith Buck was John's hero and he followed Buck's methods for growing test roses when he began his own hybridizing program seeking to produce disease resistant roses. I feel that he and Dr. Buck were kindred spirits and epitomized the quote from Lao-Tse "To see things in the seed that is genius."
When John began hybridizing he decided that if roses could out live neglect, they were worthy of considering for introduction. He watched the seedlings as they developed in the greenhouse and if they looked promising he planted the new seedlings in rows in the ground and they were only given water. No fertilizer, no pest or disease control. The survivors were then given closer attention. We have introduced over sixty new varieties. 'Morning Has Broken' is a remarkably disease resistant yellow rose and is being used by other breeders in their hybridizing programs. Selecting roses to market and then naming them is a quite a process. A name can make or break the appeal of a rose. 'Morning Has Broken' is the name of an old Scottish hymn and was sung at our wedding so I was especially pleased when he chose that name. 'Scudbuster' a red miniature revealed, as someone said, that John watched too much television news coverage during an overseas conflict. He wanted to name 'The Impressionist' Vincent van Gogh but the name was taken. He knew that Van Gogh is my favorite impressionist painter and whose often used color was yellow. The climber 'The Impressionist' was one of his favorite introductions and is loved by many as its wide acceptance has shown.
One evening several years ago I coaxed him into writing down his feelings about roses and this is what resulted:
Romancing the Rose
Entangled in the embrace of my rose garden
I taste the scented morning mist,
which only barely veils the
fiery red,
maiden pink,
and virtuous white
of my lovelies, my roses.
I draw deep a breath of tea and apple,
myrrh and musk.
Encaptured by the fragrance,
I linger there ‘til dusk.
by John Clements 1992
In recent years John has taken the photographs with a sophisticated digital camera and loved lingering in the garden taking pictures until the light was gone. He shared his knowledge liberally with me and our staff and we all got caught up in his enthusiasm. He has left us but his dream lives on in a very real way as we, the staff at Heirloom Roses, continue to live into the joy of roses.