Show santa barbara priest grows roses that tower thirty feet into the sky an ordinary little garden in santa barbara calif is crowded with potentialities for tomorrows science and realities in horticultural miracles says popular mechanics magazine in it are roses which grow nowhere else on earth roses with unbelievable colors and shapes giants and dwarfs roses with strange histories and stranger uses the garden which is one of the outposts in the struggle for scientific knowledge represents the life work of a priest he says that the world is full of theories of how plants get their characteristic colors shapes and smells of how those characteristics may be changed from generation to generation and it is the business of science to find out how these things work and to theorize afterwards down the center of the garden runs a double row of rose trees they tower thirty feet into the sky as tall as a row of pine saplings there is something unbelievable about them yet these giants of the rose family are not budded they were grown from seed A long history of careful breeding for a single characteristic height lies behind i their gigantic size close to the avenge avenue of giant rose trees is an insignificant bush it blooms irregularly but when it does the world sees a black rose only a tiny bit of dark red on the edge of some of the petals shows how it has been bred from crossing the very dark red plants of the creation of this bud the grower says it is only logical I 1 to presume that it if two very da dark rk roses were crossed the next generation would contain a rose darker than either of the originals remember that is only a theory science is not made of theories but of facts so I 1 made my experiments and eventually succeeded |