In China, there's no war of the roses

There are some tough customers hanging out in the courtyard of my apartment building.

They are not neighborhood gangsters, but rosebushes - flaunting hues of pink, red, lavender, orange, and white - each with its own intoxicating scent.

November is not the usual time one goes into rhapsodies over roses. As cool weather arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, poets and garden lovers tend to swoon over golden gingko trees and flaming-red sumac leaves.

But I am transfixed by the roses. Most of the flowers that colored our gardens in spring and summer are now memories, but the roses - brazen hussies that they are - seem as showy and fragrant as ever.

"Yesterday when I walked in the garden," says Zhao Shiwei, director of the Beijing Botanical Garden, "I was surprised to see that the rose garden was in full bloom. So it's a good time for you to come to visit the garden on the weekend."

Among many hats he wears, Zhao is also the secretary-general of the China Rose Society, whose members have traveled to the US to tour gardens and hosted American rose growers in China. "Late this month, we are going to India to attend the rose convention in Hyderabad. Next year, we will organize a big group to attend the world rose convention to be held in Lyon, France."

My hot and humid hometown of Houston, Texas, is not an ideal place to grow roses. The climate invites fungal problems, and battling powdery mildew and "black spot" is a daily chore for the most determined gardeners. Rosebushes also must be carefully pruned into a vase shape and spaced at least 3 feet apart to allow for maximum air circulation. When the first speck of mildew appears, rose growers rush out with their spray bottles: Some attack with store-bought fungicides, while others concoct homemade recipes, often involving baking soda or diluted vinegar.

I was always happier growing plants that didn't make me work so hard for their beauty.

Here in Beijing, however, I have fallen into a new love affair with roses. Gardeners outside my building do things I once considered horrors, planting roses in lousy soil, very close to each other

Pruning is Genghis Khan-style. Once the flowers are pretty much spent, gardeners swarm not with pruning shears but chainsaws. But the brutal haircut that follows means a new round of flowers will come very soon. Once, I could swear I saw petaled heads unfolding just two weeks after the pruning Armaggedon.

China's roses are indeed tough customers.

The rose has another particular charm here: It's a cultural icon. Rosa chinensis, commonly known as the China rose, is a species native to the southwestern provinces of Guizhou, Hubei and Sichuan. In the wild, it has five-petaled flowers in pink to red hues, with red "hips" (fruits) up to 2 centimeters in diameter.

Rose lovers today owe a lot to the China rose, says Zhao. Thanks to breeding with the China species, modern roses can bloom more than once in a season. Today we call any variety bred from Rosa chinensis a "China rose". "Unfortunately," Zhao adds, "most old China roses are extinct in China because they are out of fashion and they have been replaced by modern roses."

Back home, we've lost many of our "old roses" too, though a fun group called the Texas Rose Rustlers often roams the countryside to find "lost" varieties. Virtuous 'rustlers' never take cuttings without permission, though desperados in the group are known to go rose-hunting early in the afternoon, when the lady of the target house is presumed to be distracted from her garden by TV soap operas. (It's a joke. Really.)

Like China, Texas has a rose of its own.

The "Yellow Rose of Texas", made famous in a song of the same name, is nowadays seen as a metaphor for any sweet young gal from our state ("The Yellow Rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennesee"). In legend, however, it refers to the seductress of Mexican general Santa Anna, a lady with enough charm to distract him from the decisive Battle of San Jacinto.

But that, as they say, is another story.