Roses by Ping

from Laurie Brown, Spokane Gardening Examiner

'DayDream' is one of Ping Lim's Easy Elegance roses:

hardy in our area and disease resistant

Credits: Laurie Brown 2011

Ping Lim is a rose breeder who is creating roses that are mostly turning out to be great for our inland northwest area. Formerly the Rose Research Director for Bailey Nurseries, he brought many roses to market for them that thrived in both their Oregon research facility where he worked and in their Minnesota one. After the economy forced Bailey to cut back on their facilities, he started his own breeding program with Roses by Ping.

Ping Lim, making 35,000 crosses every year, has strived to create roses that are hardy, disease resistant, fragrant, and beautiful. Many of his plants have the upright, long stemmed form of Hybrid Teas; some have a more casual, shrubby form. Some of his rose introductions have won awards- in 2002 Bailey introduced ‘Love and Peace’, which looks to me a lot like the famous ‘Peace’ rose- even having the same leaf size and shape- but without the horrible disease problems that rose has. ‘Love and Peace’ (which Ping worked on with his mentor, Jerry Twomey) won the All America Rose Selections award that year. In 2005, Ping Lim won that award for ‘DayDream’, a shrub rose with arching stems and tons of small hot pink with white eyes flowers. I just got ‘DayDream’ this spring, and I’ve fallen in love with it. No disease, very vigorous growth, and it never stops blooming. I think there may still be a flower or two on it now, after hard frosts and our first snow!

Mr. Lim is also the breeder behind the Easy Elegance line, own root roses- 35 of them in the series now- that combine his criteria for great roses. This line includes many with colorations that aren’t usually disease resistant or hardy in the Inland Northwest- yellows and yellow/pink blends, and a brilliant, ‘Tropicana’ like orange (‘Acadia Sunrise’). There are some in this line that I hope I can find soon- ‘Acadia Sunrise’ because of that incredible orange; ‘Funny Face’ because of the deep pink petals edged in almost white; and ‘Fiesta’ because of it’s pink and white striped petals that look like they should be decorating a wedding cake. And I’m really hoping for some information on his new introduction ‘Champagne Wishes’ because it looks to be the slightly ecru color of ‘French Lace’, a floribunda that just will not survive a winter for me but that I love.

The Easy Elegance roses are all own-root, hardy, heavy blooming and disease resistant.

Ping Lim’s own site is here: http://www.rosesbyping.com/Home

There are some video interviews with him at this youtube channel (all 4 years old) and a new upload that is a beautiful presentation of his Easy Elegance roses set to music: http://www.youtube.com/user/u2ac#p/u 

                
          Have you visited www.RosesByPing.com lately？