If you have visited your favorite garden center recently to look at the roses, you might feel overwhelmed. There are so many different plants offered for you to plant that it is difficult to choose.

For example, McShane’s Nursery in Salinas (www.mcshanesnursery.com) has posted its current rose list, with scores of bush roses, plus groundcover roses, English roses, tree roses, and climbing roses.

When studying this list, don’t just click “print.” I did and now have a six-page list, a half-page of growing tips, and seventeen blank pages! This didn’t kill more than a very small tree, but it’s a waste nevertheless.

You can also become overwhelmed by browsing to www.regannursery.com, the website of Regan Nursery in Fremont, California.

Dealing with such rose lists or inventories you visit requires a strategy. Decide first on what you need or want for your garden (bush, groundcover, tree or climbing roses), so you could focus on plant selection.

The bush roses are basically hybrid teas and floribundas. Thousands of cultivars are available, with new ones on the market every year.

The English roses, also called shrub roses, are plants England’s David Austin has bred. He combines fragrant old roses (Gallicas, Damasks, Albas and others) with modern roses, e.g., hybrid teas and floribundas, which offer a wide range of colors and repeat flowering. These are deservedly popular plants. Check them out at www.davidaustinroses.com.

Tree, groundcover and climbing roses are I hope obvious.

Once the gardener has decided the category of rose wanted/needed, most will chose for blossom color. This is a not a bad approach, but it misses other interesting and productive strategies.

A different approach is to select a rose that is highly rated for overall performance. Look for such ratings in the American Rose Society booklet, 2012 Handbook for Selecting Roses: A Guide to Buying Roses (inquire at ars@ars-hq.org).

Another approach for the adventuresome gardener: collect uncommon species. Of the 100 species of the genus Rosa, the major ones are the white rose (R. alba), the dog rose (R canina), the cabbage rose (R. centifolia), the summer damask rose (R. damascena), the French rose (R. gallica), the eglantine rose (R. rubiginosa) and the rugosa rose (R. rugosa). Each has unique appeal.

An intriguing choice is the winged thorn rose (R. sericea f. pteracantha), a Chinese native. Its distinctions include large size (six-to-eight feet tall), white flowers with just four petals and very large, bright red thorns. Best at the back of the garden bed!

One mail order source of such roses is Vintage Gardens in Sebastopol, California. (www.vintagegardens.com).

Enjoy the Queen of the Flowers in your garden!

Our weather continues to be cool, so February is still a good time to plant bare root roses and trees—especially fruit trees, for their productivity. Garden centers have good inventories of both kinds of garden treasures.

When considering the options, the gardener must ask, “Which would be a good choice?”

In both cases, clear and reliable advice is available from Orin Martin, of the Farm & Garden at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Martin has recently summarized his knowledge of trees for the home orchard in the Monterey Bay area. He reports what grows well: Apples, European and Asian Pears, Quinces, Plums, Prune Plums, Pluots (more Plum than Apricot), Persimmons, and Walnuts.

Fruit trees that he says grow “passably well” include Figs, Peaches and Nectarines, Apricots/Apriums (more Apricot than Plum), Cherries. Some varieties of Figs and Cherries are more reliable than others.

Finally, those that grow poorly here include Almonds and most other nut species, most Cherries, most Pomegranates, and Green Gage Plums.

Martin provides a helpful discussion of chill hour requirements for fruit trees. This refers to the cumulative hours between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit that a fruit variety needs to break dormancy and grow well. This measure reflects the northern temperate zones of Europe, Asia and North America where most fruit trees originated.

Martin notes that weather conditions vary considerably with distance from the coast and elevation, and typically range from 500 to 800 hours of chill per year. Some varieties require many more chill hours (up to 2,500). The gardener is well advised to choose varieties with chill requirements that can be met in his or her garden.

Finally, Martin lists the chill requirements for several fruit varieties that are reliable in this area. He refers specifically to Santa Cruz County, which he knows best, but his advice is valid for Monterey County as well.

Here are average chill hours for locations within Monterey County, as reported by the University of California, Davis.

• Arroyo Seco                         837
• Carmel                                 822
• Castroville                           743
• King City–Oasis Road         857
• Pajaro                                  635
• Salinas North                      734
• Salinas South                      752

Gardeners who plan to plant a fruit tree or two will find value in Martin’s article, which is online and free. Here’s how to find it. Browse to the website, casfs.ucsc.edu/publications; click on “News and Notes,” and then click on “Winter 2012 Issue.”

Also, from the Publications page, click on “For the Gardener” for several brief articles on organic gardening.

Next week: the selection of bare root roses for this area.

Enjoy your garden!

A select group of home gardeners advocate high-maintenance gardening. They cultivate bonsai plants that must be watered daily and clipped frequently, tropicals, e.g., orchids or other plants that are native to hot and humid parts of the world, or plants that require a lengthy cold spell to perform their best.

Another group grows mostly plants that are content with the local climate. For Monterey Bay area gardeners, these plants are in the summer-dry (or Mediterranean) climate zones of the world. Let’s call them the practical gardeners, willing to do seasonal maintenance.

Then, we have home gardeners who aspire to low-maintenance gardening. Those who have very busy lives want beautiful and interesting gardens that require little of the gardener’s time.

These gardeners have two basic pathways to consider. One emphasizes hardscape and minimal vegetation. The aesthetic might be a classical Japanese garden, which uses stones, sand and gravel symbolically, or a severely modern garden, as might be featured in Garden Design magazine. Maintenance of these gardens can involve much sweeping or raking.

Another pathway to a low-maintenance garden relies on succulent plants, which have become fashionable in recent years.

Succulent plants store water in their leaves or stems. Some store water underground, in their roots, modified stems (e.g., corms, rhizomes, etc.) or bulbs. This latter group of succulents has been called geophytes (“earth plants”).

One large group of succulent plants is the Cactus family (Cactaceae). All cacti are succulents, but many other plant families include succulent species. They are found in a wide range of botanical classifications, but they have in common adaptation to dry environments.

Here are some ideas for landscaping with succulents.

While dry environments often are hot and sunny, succulents also grow in places that are relatively shady and cool: they are not limited to desert environments, but can thrive in a wide range of garden situations.

Succulents have several distinctive leaf and stem colors: many variations on green, blue and silvery blue, as well as reds and yellows. Landscape designers recommend grouping cool colors or hot colors, but not both.

Many succulent blossoms tend to the hot colors, and are relatively short-lived. Bulbous plants, however, produce blossoms in a wide range of colors.

Succulents range greatly in size, from low-growing sedums to 50-foot yuccas, and everything between. Designs can vary plant heights for visual interest. As always, select plants that will still fit when they reach mature size.

Succulents are low-maintenance choices for containers. Many smaller varieties grow well in shallow bowls. Succulent fanciers select containers with great care.

In a mixed bed, complement succulents with softer-textured plants: grasses, sages, etc.

Succulents will add considerable interest to your garden, and require very low maintenance. Try a small grouping to learn more.

At this time of the year, we when might enjoy a snow flurry, we have instead a flurry of garden catalogs.

The seasonal catalogs feature the latest crop of floral and vegetal hybrids. The latest creations are always interesting, but I generally prefer the more reliable species.

For the first time this year, The Territorial Seed Company is offering something really different: grafted vegetable plants. All are in the same genus Solanum, known as the nightshades: one eggplant variety (Prospero, an Italian heirloom), six single tomato varieties, and two double tomato varieties, i.e., with two varieties grafted on one rootstock.

Territorial Seeds states that grafted vegetable plants are superior to non-grafted plants in several ways. They produce larger crops of higher quality, resist diseases more effectively, have greater more vigor, etc. They can be planted earlier and harvested over a longer period, and require less treatment with pesticides.

Grafting involves splicing a shoot (the “scion”) from one plant to the rootstock (the “stock”) of a compatible plant. The rootstock is selected for desirable traits, e.g., disease resistance, overall vigor, and the like. Likewise, the scion is selected for stems, leaves, blossoms or fruits that the grower prefers. By combining the traits of the scion and the stock, the grower intends to produce a superior plant.

Grafting, a form of asexual propagation, is a fast alternative to hybridizing, which involves sexual propagation of two compatible plants to create a desirable combination of their traits.

Many grafted plants are available to the home gardener. Dwarf apple trees, for example, are usually grown by grafting the scion of a favored variety to the stock of a dwarf variety. The most popular rootstocks are the M26, which produces dwarf trees, 10 ­ 12 feet high, and the M7A, which produces semi-dwarf trees, 14 – 16 feet high.

As another example, roses are often sold as grafted varieties, which typically grow faster and more vigorously than “own root” roses. By comparison, roses grown on their own roots are more true to their variety’s traits and growth habit, hardier and longer lasting. The popular rootstocks for hybrid roses are Rosa multiflora (the “Japanese rose”) and Rosa canina (the wild “dog rose”).

Grafted roses, it must be noted, also have a tendency to sucker, i.e., the rootstock sends up a cane of its own, with leaves and flowers that differ from the grafted variety.

A friend once showed off a rose plant that delighted her by providing both white and red blossoms, not realizing that she had a sucker in flower. That’s not a problem, except that the cane from the rootstock draws energy from the grafted variety and invariably produces inferior blossoms. For these reasons, suckers should be torn from the rootstock (not clipped) when they are noticed.

Despite the familiarity of grafted fruit trees and roses bushes, grafted vegetables are still new to me. When I dug into the topic, I discovered that Asian growers have grafted vegetable plants for hundreds of years to increase plant vigor and productivity, and reduce susceptibility to disease. The technique was introduced into the United States about twenty years ago. Growers that sell to home gardeners have only recently begun to offer grafted vegetables. If grocery stores are selling vegetables grown on grafted plants, they are not labeling them as such. Many people want genetically engineered (“GE”) vegetables to be labeled, but might not be as concerned about grafted vegetables.

Japanese companies have developed robots to reduce the cost of grafting. The process requires careful handling of the young shoots, but can be reduced to instructions to a machine. Robotic grafting machines can produce up to 900 grafts per hour, but they require two or three workers to assist the machine.

If you are interested in trying something new in your vegetable garden this year, you might try a grafted tomato, to see if it lives up to its promises. Territorial Seeds apparently does not yet have a robotic grafter, so it offers hand-grafted plants. The price is $7.50, which is twice the price of an “own root” tomato of the same variety. Buying seeds is of course much less expensive per plant.

Check it out at www.territorialseed.com (look for “Grafted Vegetable Plants” under the “Live Plants” menu).

Even though this technique is quite old in some parts of the world, the introduction of grafting equipment could lead to a growing selection of grafted floral and vegetal “super plants” that are bigger, faster, sturdier, healthier and otherwise behave like products of the modern era.

Enjoy your garden!