The Resilient Rose

Roses are everywhere in Peggy Martin’s life, from her pink-hued rose room to her personalized “P M Rose” license plate. Baptized Peggy Rose Martin, it seemed that she was destined from childhood to make a lasting imprint on the rose community. Today, a hearty, pink rambler—full of life and bursting with vitality—shares a name with Peggy, whose own personal story is closely intertwined with the old garden rose.

It’s a story that begins more than forty years ago, in 1973, when Peggy and her husband built a home behind her parents’ house in Phoenix in Plaquemines Parish. “We had a clean slate with nothing. I started planting azaleas, camellias, and tropicals. Then a year or two later, I started with roses in sunny areas. By 1989, I had thousands of plants,” said Peggy.

Although an avid gardener, Peggy had difficulty with many of the modern roses she planted. “I had a few good ones, like the Queen Elizabeth and Pink Peace, but most of them died from a severe problem with fungus in their root systems. Their grafts would rot in the moist Louisiana climate,” said Peggy.

Then, in 1989, she added two nameless roses to her collection. One was a type of Red China; the other was a cutting from a rambler, passed down to her hairdresser from a family in New Orleans. “The found rambler was smothered in roses and just spectacular. I loved it. I had it growing up the tractor shed, and it grew enormous, blooming away. It was just gorgeous,” said Peggy.

Soon afterward, Peggy met Maureen Detweiler, one of the founding members of the New Orleans Old Garden Rose Society, during a presentation Detweiler gave on old roses. “It sounded like what I had. She showed pictures of old garden roses, and it was like somebody had given me a key to a treasure chest. It opened up a whole new world,” said Peggy, who had brought both the found rambler and Red China to the presentation. “I asked her to identify the two roses. She knew the one was a type of China, but she had never seen the rambler.”

On Detweiler’s advice, Peggy joined the society and started attending monthly meetings. “I got so excited. I had been organic from the git-go, and this worked well because the old roses never needed to be sprayed,” said Peggy. “I started collecting and planted in all my sunny areas. I got up to 450 varieties of old garden roses and thousands of other plants.”

In 2005, tragedy struck with Hurricane Katrina. It was the second time in her life that Peggy lost everything; the first time was during Hurricane Betsy, in 1965, when she had to swim out of her home. With Katrina, twenty feet of saltwater, marsh mud, and marsh grass covered her property. The water stood for at least three weeks, and then there were three weeks of drought.

“Everything died. It just dried up like ash. It looked like Hiroshima. All my beautiful trees were denuded from 150-mile-an-hour winds blowing incessantly for hours,” remembered Peggy. “Then I went back by the shed, and I saw dark, forest-green canes with a little new growth coming out. I thought, My God, how did this survive? I kept going back to try and salvage what I could, and each time the rose was getting more leaves. Then it bloomed in December.”

Peggy’s ruined home and garden were not her greatest losses, though.

“My mom and dad died there. They were trying to get out. I had begged them to leave, but they would not,” said Peggy. “I think they knew I was going to be devastated, so they asked God to leave me something. I believe that’s why the found rambler lived.”

Peggy’s joy at finding the rose alive was merely superficial compared to the heavy weight of loss with which she was dealing. She and her family moved to a small house in Gonzales, and Peggy lost all desire to garden.

Meanwhile, Dr. William Welch, a professor and landscape horticulturist who had met Peggy years before, happened to be eating at a Birmingham restaurant when he overheard a family from Plaquemines talking at the next table. He inquired if they knew Peggy, and they told him about her parents. Soon after, Welch contacted Peggy to offer his condolences, and during the conversation, she mentioned the found rambler that had lived through it all.

Welch told her the Garden Club of America wanted to form a restoration fund for gardens on the Gulf Coast. Money for the fund would come from selling the found rambler, the nameless rose that had somehow survived Katrina’s devastation. Several nurseries participated in growing new plants. Proceeds from the sales would help beautify gardens at the Pitot House in New Orleans and Jefferson Davis’ home, Beauvoir, in Mississippi as well as medians and public spaces in the town of Beaumont, Texas. Before they could be sold, however, the unidentified rose needed a true name of its own. The name came to Welch in the middle of the night: the Peggy Martin Rose. 

Back in Gonzales, Peggy was finding it hard to resist her friends’ urging to begin growing roses again. “Nurseries and people started sending me roses, and I started planting them. In 2008, we bought a larger home in Gonzales. By then, I had 180 roses that had been given to me. I moved all those roses to my new home, and I only lost two in the move,” said Peggy.

Peggy’s story has circulated across the country, and the Peggy Martin rose has become a household name. Not only did it survive the saltwater and extreme drought brought by Katrina, but it’s lived through blizzards and minus-thirteen-degree temperatures in Ohio.

“It’s a very hardy plant and has survived several years at both the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden in New York and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” said Peggy proudly. “It’s thornless, has big fleshy roots, and can handle extreme drought, saltwater, and cold.”

By the time the Garden Club of America’s restoration fund for Gulf Coast gardens was discontinued, in 2010, thousands of the roses had been sold. Peggy then formed an LLC and secured agreements from suppliers to collect a portion of proceeds from sales for donation to the American Rose Society and the Heritage Rose Foundation.

Over the years, Peggy has become increasingly involved in rose organizations. Since 2007, she’s been vice president of the Heritage Rose Foundation and served as treasurer in 2010. She’s also the old garden rose-and-shrub chairman for the Gulf District of the American Rose Society and currently serves as president of the New Orleans Old Garden Rose Society.

“We bring programs in and have garden tours. I love bringing people to see the Peggy Martin rose in full bloom at the end of April,” said Peggy. “A lot of the new members get so excited. I can see it in them, how I was, and I want to help them learn and collect more.”

Over the last ten years, Peggy has traveled far and wide, sharing her tale and that of the Peggy Martin rambler to rose societies from California to Boston and even Bermuda. Of course, she still finds time to continue as an avid rose collector, counting around 350 antique roses at her home today and ordering new ones every chance she gets.

Details. Details. Details.

Visit peggymartinrose.com for a list of suppliers of this rose.