Peggy Martin Rose
Peggy Martin Rose
Peggy Martin’s love of gardening is inherited, coming straight down to her from her maternal grandmother, Margaret Gomez. Some of Martin’s earliest memories are of tagging along with her to local nurseries, or spending childhood summers working at her elbow as she designed and created elaborate gardens on the grounds of the family home at Conti and St. Louis Streets in New Orleans, as well as a rambling property in St. Tammany Parish, which her grandmother named Shangri-La.
“I watched as she mixed egg shells into coffee grounds, or took big bags of peat moss she kept open to the rain,” said Martin. Her grandmother would then use the mixture to feed hydrangeas, camellias, magnolias, and roses. “I learned so much from her. Nobody had gardens like my grandmother’s.”
Before long, Martin was putting all that gardening wisdom to use on her own twelve-acre property in Phoenix, Louisiana, on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. Like her grandmother, she has a particular fondness for roses. On that property, she eventually planted 450 antique varieties alongside thousands of irises, daylilies, azaleas, camellias, magnolias, crinums, and annuals—drawing many a garden club and gardening enthusiast to her grounds.
“I’ll never have a garden like I had in Phoenix,” Martin said. “There was this gorgeous, alluvial soil built up over decades of river silt, and everything grew.”
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Martin joined the New Orleans Old Rose Society, quickly taking on the role of president. Then, in 1989, she was gifted a cutting of the rose that would secure her spot in the annals of Louisiana gardening. One day her hairdresser, Ellen DuPriest, told her, “Come out back. I want to show you something.”
Martin followed her through the back door of the salon to see a hearty climbing rose with an absolute riot of pink blossoms. “I’d never seen anything like it,” Martin said. “She had two cuttings ready for me, but she couldn’t tell me the name of the rose.” Martin’s stylist had gotten the plant from her mother-in-law, Faye DuPriest, who’d gotten it from a friend in the Garden District in New Orleans. But none of them knew of its origins.
“We’d book speakers for the Old Rose Society and I’d lure them to my house with the promise of fresh seafood from my husband’s shrimp boat,” Martin said. Once she got them there, she’d show them the rose and try to get an ID.
Martin planted the semi-thornless climbing rose alongside an unsightly tractor shed on her property. In just six years, it grew to forty feet by thirty feet, completely obscuring the shed. As the rose proliferated, Martin searched for its lineage.
“We’d book speakers for the Old Rose Society and I’d lure them to my house with the promise of fresh seafood from my husband’s shrimp boat,” Martin said. Once she got them there, she’d show them the rose and try to get an ID.
Martin hosted visiting rose experts from as far away as Australia and India. She sent off cuttings to The Antique Rose Emporium in Texas, Vintage Gardens in California, Petals From the Past in Alabama, and other collectors of old roses. LSU alum Dr. William Welch, a professor of horticulture at Texas A&M and longtime garden columnist for Southern Living, took particular interest. Still, no one could tell her anything about the multi-stemmed woody vine.
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As Martin continued her search, Dr. Welch convinced her to put the rose into commerce under the name “Louisiana Rambler.” “He told me, ‘Peggy, we’ve got to share this rose with others,’” Martin said.
The next chapter in the life of this mystery rose began on August 29, 2005, a day of infamy for all those living along that stretch of the Mississippi River. Martin and her husband, MJ, prepared to evacuate their levee-front home ahead of Hurricane Katrina, as they’d done for twenty storms before. But no amount of pleading could convince Martin’s elderly parents to evacuate with them. Sadly, the older couple perished in the Category Five hurricane that hours later destroyed so much of their home region.
Devastated by this unfathomable loss, the Martins relocated to Gonzales, where Martin said she was like a zombie for months. “I couldn’t do anything and barely got out of bed,” she said. “But people started sending me roses. Nurseries were sending them a dozen at a time.” What could she do? She began planting them at her new home.
When the Martins finally mustered the courage to return to Phoenix, three months after the storm, it looked “like Hiroshima,” according to Martin. “There was nothing but black sticks and ash as far as you could see,” she said. “But there was that rose. After 150-mile-an-hour winds, a thirty-foot tidal surge, and salt water that soaked the area for weeks, I could see that it had new growth.”
“Rationally, I know it survived because these old roses have such deep root systems,” she said. “But in my heart, I believe my parents knew how hard this was going to be on me, and they asked God to leave me that one rose.”
It was hard to believe, but Martin has a theory. “Rationally, I know it survived because these old roses have such deep root systems,” she said. “But in my heart, I believe my parents knew how hard this was going to be on me, and they asked God to leave me that one rose.”
Word got out about her indomitable rose vine and, before long, friends at Chamblee’s Rose Nursery in Slidell asked to gather cuttings from the plant. “Mr. Chamblee and his son picked me up in a van filled with five-gallon buckets of water,” Martin said. “We gathered as many cuttings as we could and every one of them survived.”
They began selling the plants to other rose enthusiasts and, before long, Martin got a call from her old friend, Dr. Welch. “He asked permission to rename the rose ‘The Peggy Martin Rose,’” she said. The idea was for the Garden Club of America to sell Peggy Martin roses, with a dollar from each sale going toward restoration of three historic properties damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Twenty years later, the Martins have made Gonzales their home and Peggy Martin is doing what she does best, making her corner of the world gorgeous with flowers. Each spring, Peggy Martin Roses burst into bloom all across the South. Gardeners post countless pictures on social media of their own showstopping Peggy Martin in full regalia, reminders of the resilience of the human spirit and the beauty that can triumph over tragedy.
