Flower lovers linger on the sidewalk in front of Anek Imphitak’s brick rambler. Gardeners stop and stare. Even folks who don’t know a daffodil from a dandelion get distracted.
Lilies, peonies, honeysuckle, baby’s breath and butterfly bushes dot the garden in the Hoffman Heights neighborhood of Aurora.
But mostly there are roses. Bunches of them!
“If you were to climb up on the roof and look down, it would be like looking at a bouquet,” said neighbor Carole Ann Hill.
Imphitak’s love of roses took root early on, but it didn’t really begin to blossom until he started turning a disheveled yard into a dazzling garden, one plant at a time.
Now, more than 300 rose bushes in at least 200 varieties paint a rainbow of color and fragrance across his quarter-acre lot each spring. He hopes the display brings as much joy to passers-by as it does to him.
“They are like medicine,” said Imphitak, 53, who lives with his wife, Juthathip, and his teenage daughter, Nutthavasa. “They make people happy. They relax. They forget (about their troubles) for a moment.”
At least, that’s the way it happened for him. He was a little boy in Thailand when his brother brought a rose into the family home. It was the first one Imphitak had seen and he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. It was perfect, with its delicate pink petals and the patches of white and yellow that brightened them. Even the thorns intrigued him.
“That rose painted a picture in my heart,” he said.
As a young man studying religion in Thailand, his affinity for all kinds of plants and his natural talent for growing things earned Imphitak a reputation. Though he never took a gardening class, he won the respect of schooled horticulturalists and master gardeners, who looked to him to nurse their ailing plants back to health.
“I feel like I understand them, you know, the feeling of the tree,” said Imphitak, who came to the United States more than 20 years ago. “If people look at a tree to make the tree happy, they can grow anything.”
He put that philosophy to the test seven years ago, when he moved with his family into an Aurora home with a yard in desperate disrepair. When he spotted a rose in a nearby market, he finally decided to grow his own.
Once he got started, he couldn’t stop.
“I bought every rose in the market,” he said. “The first time, I didn’t look at anything. I just grabbed them, put them in the cart and went to the cashier.”
Since then, he’s learned to inspect each plant’s packaging for signs that it will flourish in the Colorado climate and that its flowers will unfold each year.
He worked hard to get the garden started, adding a plant or two at a time: red Mister Lincolns, pink Paradises, yellow Gold Medals, white John F. Kennedys . . . the list goes on. Once he got the flowers arranged the way he wanted them, though, there was little left to do.
Caring for a glamorous garden is a lot easier than cutting grass, said Imphitak, who sold his lawn mower to a neighbor years ago.
Most of his roses, he said, can survive the entire season with little water. And, although he gets excited about new hybrid varieties introduced each year, there’s no room for planting more.
The bounty of roses he gets from the bushes he already has could fetch a pretty penny, but to Imphitak, who works for the Department of Homeland Security, the joy the flowers bring to others is worth much more.
“I just ask people to come if they need them,” he said.
And they do. He plucks and prunes for friends and neighbors hosting birthday parties, religious activities and other occasions where flowers are a centerpiece. The more he picks, the more blossoms — and aroma — the bushes produce.
“You absolutely can smell it coming up on it,” Hill said. “That scent just takes over.”
Imphitak finds the fragrance so relaxing that he often practices meditation outside. He is at home, yet someplace else, in the center of the garden he created, surrounded by his beloved roses.
“Some people go on vacation,” he said. “I have vacation here every day.”
Roses can be easy to grow if you pick climate-friendly type
Roses are elegant, romantic and revered, but don’t let their reputation fool you. These flowers can be relatively easy to grow. In fact, more people grow roses than any other flower, according to the online gardening community The Gardener’s Network.
Perhaps the most important factor to consider when attempting to raise your own fabulous flowers, according to the American Rose Society, is the particular climate in which you live.
Here are Boulder gardening expert Mikl Brawner’s top five tips for growing great roses in Colorado:
1. Purchase cold-hardy, disease-resistant varieties.
2. Choose own-root roses over grafted ones because they are better able to tolerate the cold and they live longer.
3. Plant roses in compost-amended soils in at least six hours of sun and in mulch that is 3 to 4 inches deep.
4. Fertilize twice a year with a mostly organic fertilizer.
5. Water deeply once a week (twice a week in July), and prune out dead and diseased canes in spring.
Mikl Brawner operates Harlequin’s Gardens Sustainable Nursery and Garden Center in Boulder with his wife, Eve. Among natural gardening and other topics, the nursery specializes in cold-hardy roses. Visit their website at .
