It’s an unusually warm late winter morning, so Nathan Beckner, cup of coffee in hand, ventures out to see a few friends.
“Here’s Ghislaine de Feligonde,” he says, pointing. “She looks really healthy. She’s going to be fantastic this summer — last year she was just spilling over the top of the fence …”
He continues on through his small West Rogers Park garden, under a wrought-iron archway, stepping through rusty winter ivy, and points at an empty urn positioned carefully in an advantageous corner. “That is where Mrs. Dudley Cross lives,” he says. “She’s about 8 feet tall, 5 feet wide, and I just couldn’t bear to cut all that back to the ground. So she’s in the garage, all covered up with her girdle on, waiting for spring.”
He’s talking about roses, of course. And he’s not really apologetic about referring to them as though they’re people. “Well, they have people names …” he says, grinning. “They are kind of like people, really. They each have their own needs, their personality. They are all unique.”
Beckner is a rosarian, by way of a whole other career path, a man who let the tug of memory and intuition lead him into a life that’s completely tangled up with the thorny, complicated, lovely plants.
Roses, in the garage: “We can still fit the car in there,” he says. Roses, on a life list of things to grow: “I want to bring back all of these old varieties …” Roses, sprouting from tiny seeds in a tray near the back door: “It’s a labor of love, really.”
Indeed.
Truthfully, his case isn’t all that unusual. Humans have been moved by — and moved to care for and cultivate — roses for thousands of years. “Across all civilizations,” Beckner says, “roses have been this sacred flower. It’s almost like, is the rose evolving to have us evolve to care for it?” Which leads to a thought that might have more immediate relevance: In the equation of gardener and garden, who is really changing whom?
In Beckner’s case, the roses had him at day one. “I grew up on a family farm in Indiana,” he says, “and my grandmother grew roses. The size, shape and fragrance of those roses are such a visceral childhood memory.”
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Like most farm kids, he eventually had to make a run for it. He entered the University of Miami with a plan to study marine biology but emerged as a photographer. He was a young man living in Miami Beach, mingling with glamorous people. “I was that weird person in his 20s who was like, ‘Um, yeah, I like to grow stuff,'” he says. “People were like, ‘OK …'”
On the rooftop of his apartment, Beckner had experienced his “first rose renaissance.” Or maybe a farm flashback: “I knew the basics of being a plantsman,” he says, “I knew how to grow things. The rooftop was trial and error, though.”
Dogged as any farmer with a troublesome back 40, he dragged pots and soil and plants up to the roof, only to find new stems that never flowered, plants that were flourishing one minute and lagging the next, sun and wind that left his roses gasping for a drink. “I learned the hard way,” he says, “you plant something in containers, it’s a whole other process to get it growing.”
Beckner realized he had to figure out what grandma’s rose garden had that his pots were lacking. So he started by returning to the earth — literally, the potting mix he had been schlepping in by the bagful. “You put all that potting soil in the container,” he says, “and you don’t have all those great microbes and the stuff you have in the ground. So you’re going to need to fertilize. Then, every time it rains, you’re just washing all that fertilizer out of the pot. Long term, top fertilizer isn’t good. The roots just don’t have access to those nutrients.”
Finally, he faced facts: “I had to start all over again.”
Research revealed a two-part answer that he still swears by today: a DIY drip irrigation system for the pots, with an attached fertilizer injector. “You put it together sort of like Lego.” he says. “And then you really don’t have to do anything. It’s invaluable for containers.”
Just as he had the roof roses in working order, however, Beckner found himself uprooted — to a condo in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, where his slice of the great outdoors was a little skimpy. “For two years, I crammed a bunch of stuff on a little balcony,” he says. “It was basically a window box. I had such culture shock, both as a person and as a gardener. I lost almost all the plants I had from Miami.”
A move to Rogers Park, and a building with a big, empty rooftop, set things right again. “I knew what I needed to start with, and then the collecting started — the stuff I had before, the stuff my grandmother grew, things I had always wanted to grow.” Thrilled to have a garden back, Beckner had roses up and growing in no time: Duchess de Brabant dripping delicately over the side of a pot, Variegata di Bologna and Chapeau de Napoleon flinging up brawny canes. He positioned pots as though he were composing a bouquet, his eye seeking out companions for each rose — a deep purple clematis ‘Betty Corning’ entwined gracefully with Variegata di Bologna, upright nicotiana lending order to climbing Iceberg.
The garden was a dream: “It was like an oasis,” he says, “I’d like to get up there in the morning, because the roses start to open around 8 or 9 o’clock, see what was blooming. And then in the evening, you could just enjoy the sunset and relax. Everything looks different from up there; the light is different.”
He started to dabble in crossing varieties and propagation. “I wanted to propagate these old roses that have been with humanity for thousands of years,” he says, “A lot of the stuff, I collected and ordered from people who had rescued roses. I would order little small cuttings from them, and there’s a great sense of satisfaction and pride to see them grow into these magnificent plants when they were just these sad little sticks. They’re like your children.”
He found himself spending more time and energy on his deep dive into the world of roses. The fascination he had felt as a kid was growing, and his photography business was undeniably fading. He became a regular at Gethsemane Garden Center, where he would wind up in long conversations with Victoria Beal, the head rosarian. “Eventually,” he says, “she told me, ‘You should just work here.’ And I suddenly saw how things could flow in that direction. I thought, you know, I can do this, even though I don’t have a degree or any education in it. I just knew roses, so I became a rosarian.”
Often those who make a garden are seekers, and not just for the perfect showy plot. “I was sort of going back to my roots,” says Beckner, “and I had the thought that I wished my grandmother could see me now. I think she’d get a kick out of it. I’m the only one of the children who ended up growing things. And it’s a lot more rewarding. I felt like I was going in a direction that had meaning.”
These days, Beckner’s still headed in that direction. After eight years at Gethsemane, he recently began work with a vertical garden company. And his rooftop roses have been moved (yes, thorns and all) to a backyard a few blocks to the west, where Mrs. Dudley Cross now waits for spring in a cozy garage. Come summer, the deck will be swathed in the pale ivory-pink blooms of Madame Alfred Carriere, and Beckner will be cutting rose bouquets for parties or as gifts for friends. “Sometimes I look back at photos from the summer,” he says, “and think, did those plants actually do that? It’s kind of miraculous. You can hardly believe it’s possible, and then they do it again, year after year.”
And so does the gardener: There are those roses he hopes to grow and the hunt for a new variety he can (maybe, one day) call his own. Roses, it turns out, have done a pretty good job of giving everything shape. “There’s just something about them,” he says. “They’re fragile, yet thorny. Sort of like … life.”
Nathan Beckner’s top five roses everyone should own:
Mrs. Dudley Cross: “Just because she flowers all the time.”
Rugosa species, either alba or rubra: “They’re tough and easy, and they have hips to make really good tea. It’s really good tea.”
Golden Celebration: “This is a David Austin rose, and it’s the most amazing golden yellow color, with a chalice shape and an amazing scent — citrusy and fruity.”
Chapeau de Napoleon: “I had him for so many years, and then … polar vortex. Poor guy. He has these beautiful mossed buds, which have a scent like pine and almost look like a tricorn hat that Napoleon wore.”
Oklahoma: “This is a hybrid tea. His brother is Mr. Lincoln, which everybody knows and stores sell a lot of, but people have forgotten poor Oklahoma.”