How To Propagate A Rose
Sweet small of damask roses
LEO and Graham Smith's retirement plan has the smell of success, writes KIM WOODS
The roses may be thorny and straggly, but the perfume they yield is gold.
Each spring Leo Pendlebury and Graham Smith debud 4000 damask roses on their Gundagai , in southern NSW, property to produce a fragrant rose oil.
The two tonnes of rose petals equate to four litres of oil which is used in perfumes, hand creams, lotions and shower gels.
The damask rose dates back to pre-Christian times and was brought to Europe by the Crusaders.
Today the majority of rose fragrances come from the damask variety kazanlik.
There may be plenty of romance around the fragrance, but the work that goes into cultivating and harvesting the rose can be back breaking.
To achieve 1kg of attar, the foundation of rose perfume, 1.2 million blooms are needed.
Leo and Graham took to rose growing as a "retirement plan" but have found the crop labour intensive, though rewarding.
With an army background, Leo had no experience in horticulture and relied on Graham's passion for gardening to get the enterprise started.
When they bought their 9.7ha block at Gundagai 11 years ago, it had been badly eroded by the Slate Quarry Creek.
Tree plantings have arrested the erosion and produced an attractive extension to the home garden.
Due to the farm's small size, the pair needed an intensive horticultural enterprise that could occupy them into retirement.
"We were living in Albury at the time and looked at persimmons, grapes and olives," Leo said.
"My sister Maureen was reading an article on rose oil and said why don't we grow roses."
Knowing roses were hardy, the pair researched the various varieties suitable for oil production.
"We thought rose growing could be a bit of glamour but it's not as glamorous as it is made out to be," Leo said.
How To Propagate A Rose - News
"We over-watered the roses and by the following July they were monstrous," Leo said. "It has been a learning curve. Now we use a bit of logic, and trial and error. "We propagate our own roses but I haven't had much success at multiplying them in pots
3 (Bloomberg) -- It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The "corporate psychopaths" at the helm of our financial institutions are to
During this period, an estimated 1 million Filipinos were killed. This is the kind of hatred that wars rely on and propagate. My father, born on the island of Luzon in 1925, was part of the insurgency that rose to resist the invaders.
Other private-equity firms, which first rose to prominence as buyout barons of the “Barbarians at the Gate” era, have grappled with how to propagate themselves for next generations. This year, Silver Lake has made a number of high-profile bets,
In it, Jesus issues “dire warnings against the teaching of heretics who propagate falsehoods” and, strikingly in accordance with Qur'anic thought, it labels the heretics as “the bishops and deacons of the proto-orthodox churches, and their false