Rosa sp. 'Magic Dragon'

A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.

Moore was famous for two habits that set him apart from the rose trade. He grew everything own-root rather than grafting onto rootstock, since grafted roses fail more often in the garden, and he selected for garden performance, for disease resistance, cold tolerance, and repeat bloom, over the show-bench glamour the industry chases. He called the big-flowered hybrid teas of the day cabbages on a stick, and he kept breeding into his nineties, dying at one hundred and two in 2009.

'Magic Dragon' is one of Moore's climbing miniatures from the late 1960s and shows everything he was breeding for. The flowers are small, about an inch and a half across, but come in showy clusters, fully double, in a clean deep red that holds through summer heat without fading or turning purple. Bloom starts in mid-spring and runs in waves through mid-fall, heaviest in late spring and again in early fall. The slender, flexible canes reach five to seven feet, easily trained on a low fence, a mailbox, a tuteur, or a small arbor, or left to ramble as a deep-red flowering groundcover. The small, leathery, dark green leaves carry the disease resistance Moore prized, and gardeners across many climates report the rose to be effectively immune to blackspot and mildew.

The rose came into the Woodlanders catalog the way most of ours do, hand to hand, gardener to gardener. George Mitchell, longtime senior staff at Woodlanders, received the plant some years ago from the late Norm Beal of Raleigh, North Carolina, a plantsman whose collections quietly fed southeastern gardens for decades. George took to 'Magic Dragon' at once, propagated the rose for the nursery, and added the plant to the list. So the chain runs from Ralph Moore in California in 1969, to Norm Beal in Raleigh, to George Mitchell at Woodlanders, and on to your garden, a small plant carrying a remarkable lineage.

'Magic Dragon' is genuinely versatile. Trained on a four-foot picket fence the rose makes a sea of small red flowers from May through October; grown on a tuteur in a patio container the plant becomes a focal point without a full climber's footprint; set at the foot of a trellis with a clematis threaded through, the contrasting flower sizes play off each other; left to ramble, the canes cover a slope or a wall as few miniatures can. Like all roses the plant wants full sun, decent drainage, and a late-winter pruning to stay tidy, and unlike most roses seems to want nothing else.