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Who could resist a rose called ‘Hot Lady’? It’s a spectacular hot pink rose, too, with two-inch-long buds that look good in a vase for at least 10 days. And the color! Hot, hot pink. It’s the kind of rose that florists love, not least because it appeals to the hot ladies for whom it was named.

As it happens, hot ladies have plenty of hot pink roses to choose from, thanks in large part to a century-old German firm called Rosen Tantau (Tantau Roses).

Just four men have run the company in that century, each one taking an inventive approach to rose breeding. Founded by Matthias Tantau in 1906 in a small town outside Hamburg, Germany, the firm became internationally known following World War II, when Jackson Perkins introduced ‘Garnette’, a popular red greenhouse rose, to the United States. It became a florists’ standard. Continue Reading…

Flowers are little touches of color that make the world a more beautiful place in which to live. Scientists will probably never catalog and study every flower in the world because there are millions of types of flowers. Flowers come in countless shapes, sizes and colors, and they exist in almost every kind of climate across the globe.

The purpose of a flower is to create seeds so that the plant is guaranteed to reproduce itself. Most flowers consist of three main parts. The stamens are considered the male parts of the flower. In general, the stamens produce pollen. The pistil is considered the female part of the flower. The pistil contains the ovary, and in the ovary is an ovule, an unfertilized portion of the plant which will become a seed after pollination. If pollen from the stamens comes in contact with the pistil, the ovule in the ovary will be fertilized, producing a seed. The petals are the colorful flower parts that make flowers so lovely to see. Petals attract insects, like bees, wasps and butterflies, to assist in pollination. Continue Reading…