There is a chapter on Ralph Moore in Jack Harkness' book, 'The Makers of Heavenly Roses,' a series of elegant essays on the lives and times of some of the great rose hybridizers and their families. The Moore chapter is almost sui generis. It is the shortest chapter on any individual hybridizer in the book. There is an almost unnatural simplicity about the assessment of Moore: a contented man who found the right girl, pursued the right career, and practiced and taught the religion of his church over the course of a long life.

In a reflection on his life, Ralph Moore noted that he never had academic training in genetics, but became a major hybridizer, that he never took a course in business, but managed to keep Sequoia Nursery afloat for seven decades, and that he only watched an hour of television per week. Nevertheless, he consistently found that the 'rules' primarily existed in the realm of imagination and fettered men rather than freeing them. In that, he was particularly American and pragmatic from the very outset.

This pragmatism was reflected in his attitude toward classification. He crossed the china rose 'Old Blush' with 'Old Blush' to produce 'Mr. Bluebird,' which he classified as a miniature. Miniatures had a market; chinas did not. His initial classification of 'Fair Molly' was as a miniature, but was later changed to a polyantha. There might have been a surfeit of miniatures that year. In a 1949 article in the American Rose Annual, he noted that any cultivar that fit the description of a polyantha should be considered to be one. This seeming indifference to parentage claims in favor of growth habits and characteristics would enable him to classify 'Red Fairy' as a polyantha despite the fact that its parents were essentially a combination of a miniature crossed with possibly another miniature. You would have to trace back four generations to find a polyantha in the heritage of 'Red Fairy.'

And yet there was also the quixotic American penchant for setting problems to be solved that had little commercial payoff while providing the stuff that dreams are made of. Taming the moss rose classification into repeat bloom and the miniature class or dragging the striped rose oddity into miniatures, rugosas and floribundas were not in response to a commercial need but a personal one-the need to answer the idiosyncratic question of 'What if you crossed this with that?' It is easy to ascribe the results of the hard work and the grit to overcome failure as a form of genius, but there are many who labor long and hard in vain. The Moore genius was in asking the particular question in the first place.

In the last years, there would be the comfort of going to Ryan's or the Waffle House for lunch, where in a sense everyone knew his name and his preferences.

There would always be a healthy appetite for food as well as for life. There would be a later year love affair with blueberry ice cream. Some memes would indicate fatigue or impatience with the small talk of strangers. Anytime the subject the iniquity of minimum wage legislation arose, it was time to take one's leave. If the conversation at lunch became the polite exchange of pleasantries of a younger generation, it was quite probable for Mr. Moore to start making crosses in his head and writing them down on pieces of paper so as not to lose them or the time spent in doing it. Genius has it own schedule.

He retained an eye for a pretty woman and would walk one away from a group to give her a private tour of the greenhouses, all the time seeking opinions on the roses to be introduced or not, on the commercial appeal of this or that, or the fragrance of another. He had a prodigious store of tales of Lammerts, or Hennessey, or Harkness or Swim and quietly reveled in the telling of them. Even as a young man he had a certain talent for tweaking a comment. In registering his first rose, 'Baby Mine,' in 1929, a cross of 'Cl Cecile Brunner' and an unknown seedling that produced a sulphur yellow bloom, he noted that it did not turn 'pink' like the other Yellow Cecile Brunner-an apparent reference to a Yellow Cecile Brunner introduced by the Howard Company in the 1920's.

He had a long and vital history with Polyanthas and at the end of his life was not convinced that the secrets of the polyanthas had been totally explored and exploited. His own breeding had used major elements in 'Etoile Luisante' and 'Gloria Mundi' to an incredible extent. And he produced three polyanthas toward the end of his career including 'Polly Sunshine' as well as the previous referenced 'Red Fairy' and 'Fair Molly.'

In his hundredth year he dreamed about a white rose with a red center. But that dream was not to be realized. The girl had gone, the career was illustrious but essentially over, and the certitudes of his faith remained unchanged but less popular in a more secular and skeptical and desolate time. In his Heaven, he is probably 30 years old again, starting a nursery on Noble Avenue on the outskirts of Visalia in the tail end of a Great Depression with $800 and a skinful of dreams sufficient for a lifetime.