Prejudice in the garden is like prejudice anywhere - sometimes based on unhappy experiences, sometimes taught by our parents and passed along to our children, or mindless reactions to events.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s was a very happy time as we had lovely weather, lots of vegetables and fruits, no freeways or smog. And everyone, yes, everyone, had a garden. Looking at old photographs of the different neighborhoods where we rented our large houses, there is clear evidence that my mother’s gardening work is noticeable. Although the times were difficult because of the Depression, there were flourishing nurseries. Each spring my mother would buy a few roses to expand her collection of Hybrid Teas, the only really popular ones that everyone grew.

My father was a rock-ribbed Democrat who followed all the work that Franklin D. Roosevelt was doing to extract us from the difficult economic condtions. The previous president, Herbert Hoover, was maligned by my father almost daily. “He got us into this mess.” Everything was black and white: the Republicans were the villains. Sound familiar? I accepted this view with no reservations.

So the day arrived when my mother brought home ‘President Herbert Hoover’ a Hybrid Tea developed by L. B. Coddington in 1930. The long pointed bud, flowers of orange, red, and gold, at least 25 petals to a bloom gave it an appearance easy to identify among other roses with the same coloring. I recall it had horrendous prickles. One large bloom appeared at the end of a long cane. And quite lovely in a bouquet.

After my mother had planted it in the autumn, she fed it regularly and provided lots of water. Los Angeles has never had dependable rainfall except when the occasional flood caused a lot of damage. As a large shrub, the rose showed healthy canes and finally lots of buds. A bouquet was on the dining room table, and my father commented on how lovely the blossoms were.

“Yes, aren’t they lovely. The rose is called “President Herbert Hoover.”

My father looked as if he had had a stroke.

“Get that rose out of the house! You know what I think of that man!”

“Don’t be silly. The rose doesn’t know it has a bad name.”

“If you don’t throw it out, I shall!” My father was generally a soft-spoken, peaceful man. At that moment his face was a brilliant red.

I don’t remember how long my mother stood her ground, but she removed the vase and roses. It was understood that this rose was never to be brought into the house.

Well! I took in all of this excitement and thought my father had won one of his rare arguments with his wife.  My mother sulked for awhile, but peace was restored.

Since that time I have been as guilty as my father about plants, their names, their habits, especially roses. Under her tutelage I learned to love roses, helped her in the garden, and began a life-long passion for gardening  - the only one of her four children who liked to grow things.

Part of my dislike of the color orange grew out of this experience with poor President Hoover. In some strange way I made the connection of the color with political incorrectness, long before we had the word.

I didn’t have my own rose garden until I was in my 40s and living on the Central California coast. One of my first purchases was ‘Tropicana’   (known in Europe as ‘Super Star’). Those who know the color of this rose will ask why I bought it because it has a bilious orange-red glow to it. Everyone was raving about it so I must have it. Planted alone so its powerful color does not conflict with any pink or red blooms nearby, it didn’t look so bad. My first bouquet was quite lovely, and I won a first prize with it at the local rose society competition.

The next year things started out well - it was a much larger shrub. When I examined it closely I found it had rust! And on closer examination I found black spot! A few weeks later mildew covered most of the foliage. But I was too stubborn to admit I had purchased a lemon. It was moved to a spot far removed from my other roses, and I hoped it would improve with lots of spraying. It didn’t. At that point I was convinced that orange was at the bottom of its troubles. It took years to pull it up and put it on the bonfire.

To this day I have trouble liking orange flowers on any kind of plant. I bought a dozen red crocosmias (‘Lucifer’), which turned out to be orange. And I have been pulling them up for twenty years, digging up the bulbs, and  still they keep showing up every spring. No matter how much I have changed the soil, I have never eliminated all the bulbs.

Students gave me a gift when I retired of an orange bouganvillea. When I saw the color of the blooms, my heart sank. Where can I plant that where no one would see it? I had to grow it - who knows when one of the students would drop by to see how the plant was doing. And they did. I finally poured a little gasoliine on the roots and it died. So I could say that the poor thing was unhappy and gave up.

CapeHoneysuckle (Tecomaria capensis) was another gift given to me when I finished building the house. I planted that in the most inhospitable soil at the entrance to the driveway. Sandy, dry as a bone, one of the hottest areas in the garden, the brilliant orange-red blossoms start in October and flourish throughout what we call winter.  That was over thirty years ago and it is thriving. Little did I know at the time that it is from South Africa and loves that kind of soil and sun. When I was in Cape Town I saw it growing wild along dry, hot, steep slopes. It sends runners, and they are now creating a small forest for itself.

It is absolutely true that orange blossoms, especially of roses - there are all shades - simply do not go well with subtle pinks and strong reds. When I visit public rose gardens here and abroad, I have to steel myself for the shock of seeing yards and yards of color madness - brilliant oranges mixed with all the other colors of the rainbow. One particular outrage is called ‘Oranges ‘n’ Lemons’, a shrub from 1994 with strong orange and lemon stripes. A vigorous shrub, one can see it from a mile away. Sad to say, it always draws a crowd at my favorite nursery, where it is very popular in sales.

At this time there are 116 orange roses listed in Modern Roses XII, the international index. And there is no indication that hybridizers are about to stop creating more of them. And nearly all are Hybrid Teas.

I have to admit a terrible crime. I was editor of the paperback edition of Botanica’s Roses (2000) after spending a year working as an advisor and writer to the large, hard-cover edition in 1997. I had to use only 2000 roses of the 4000 in the larger book. No one checked on me as my two editors trusted me to do a good job. I chose as few orange roses as I could without giving my selection away, making sure I did include the more famous ones. I had lunch recently in Sydney with my editor, Gordon Cheers, and I hope he never reads this.

The Hybrid Tea is the most popular rose in the world today. It has declined a bit in its popularity with the advent of such new types as those created by David Austin and the Harkness nursery in England. I am happy to say that Meilland in France has restrained itself from oranges in the long list of HTs created there. And Kordes of Germany, the other large company, has followed suit.