A mysterious rose survived Hurricane Katrina and spread throughout the US. Its origins are still unknown

A mysterious rose in Louisiana withstood weeks underwater during Hurricane Katrina, outlasting 450 other roses in its garden. Today, the “Peggy Martin rose” blooms nationwide as a living emblem of survival.

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    (CNN) -- If you follow the Mississippi River to where it meets the ocean, you will be in Plaquemines, Louisiana’s southernmost parish. Known for its seafood and offshore oil and gas, Plaquemines is also where an unknown rose withstood the brutal force of Hurricane Katrina.

The genesis of this climbing rose bush, which becomes covered with delicate bursts of pink flowers every spring, is still murky. But the plant came to join Peggy Martin’s garden in the community of Phoenix, Louisiana, some 16 years before Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an estimated total of $125 billion in damage in its wake.

“In 1989, it was given to me by a friend,” Martin said of the rose. That friend told Martin she received the flower from her mother-in-law, and though Martin has spent years researching and traveling trying to find out its true origin, the plant’s lineage beyond that remains a mystery.

“It’s probably from the 1800s. And I think it originated in Europe. But we can’t find out … positively,” she told CNN.

The plant’s background became the subject of more intense interest after the hurricane, when it was discovered to have likely survived some time submerged underwater. Martin said it was the only one among 450 antique roses in her garden to have made it through the storm.

Dr. William C. Welch, professor and extension landscape horticulturist emeritus at Texas A&M University and author of several books on antique roses and heirloom gardening, was also unable to identify the rose when he examined it while visiting the area to speak at a New Orleans Old Garden Rose Society gathering in 2003. He took cuttings from Martin’s home and began growing the flower at his own property before eventually becoming entwined in its broader post-Katrina path.

The plant’s miraculous feat of survival may seem as enigmatic as its ancestry, but the two are likely connected, according to Welch’s colleague Dr. Greg Grant, the Smith County horticulturist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

“It’s all about genetics, because it’s just from really, really tough genetic stock,” said Grant, who with Welch also cowrote “The Rose Rustlers,” which features Martin’s story. “There’s no way to say specifically why that exact specimen survived, but it really does have to do with genetics.”

One tough rose

Modern roses emerged in 1867 with the development of the first hybrid tea, according to the American Rose Society. These varieties tend to have a reputation for being fussy, requiring constant attention.

“The conception is that they’re not tough, that they require spraying, that you have to have the perfect culture. And a lot of that has been breeding; to breed these perfect flowers, but they bred out characteristics that made the rose easy to grow in our backyards,” said Mike Shoup, president of the Heritage Rose Foundation and author of “Empress of the Garden.”

“When you consider the body of rose as a whole entity, the rose is extremely tough. It has endured thousands of pests and thousands of … problems, and it still is considered man’s favorite flower,” Shoup added.

Martin’s many rose plants had their grit tested after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, near Grand Isle, Louisiana, about 28 miles (45 kilometers) south of her home in Phoenix. The storm arrived in the area with winds over 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center.

Martin and her husband, MJ, were no strangers to evacuating when a hurricane approached. But she said Katrina “was the worst of the worst.” After the storm passed, getting back into Phoenix was impossible, Martin added. One of the biggest challenges was flooding.

“In Phoenix, they had about 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) of standing water,” said Ken Dugas, Plaquemines parish engineer. The water topped the levees designed to protect the area from flooding.

It “filled it up like a bowl,” Martin said. The water remained, unable to escape, until a levee was broken. Martin’s parents, Rosalie and Pivon Dupuy — who lived next to the couple and chose not to evacuate — died amid the storm’s destruction.

Three weeks went by before Martin and her husband could return and assess the damage to her property. She remembers the ruins as “black sticks and gray ash.”

“We lost everything we owned,” she said. “Every plant — everything completely dead. And then as I was walking past my mother’s house and to the back where our house was, I saw these long, green, dark canes hanging off the tractor shed.”

Traits of a survivor

The rose on the shed that survived was the only thing in Martin’s garden to pull through, aside from a few dormant daffodil and Crinum lily bulbs. Charles Shi, a botanical horticulturalist specializing in wild roses at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom said the sturdy plant is likely “an heirloom rambler with broad climatic tolerance.”

The mystery flower is not a modern hybrid tea rose, “but closer in character to old climbing roses and hardy species relatives,” Shi said. “This explains much of its durability.”

Shi hasn’t studied Martin’s rose but said he is confident based on the flower’s appearance that it has “an amount” of Rosa banksiae in its genes, referring to a species collected from China in the early 1800s and brought to Kew. Rosa banksiae is now a yellow climbing rose popular among gardeners.

“You can see the petal structure is quite similar. The size of the flower is similar, but the color is different,” he told CNN in an email. “I think it is a lot closer to a wild rose than to the more cultivated roses. So another word we call that are the heirloom roses, so bred relatively early on before the mass breeding of roses.” Most likely, he said it was a “chance seedling” that originated in a garden.

He identified three traits that could have helped such a specimen survive the ravages of Katrina: a rugged nature and a low-oxygen metabolism that allowed it to rely on stored reserves of sugars; an ability to cope with salt stress from being inundated with seawater — either by excluding salts at the roots or compartmentalizing them inside its cells; and the ability to quickly regenerate, rapidly resprouting buds and forming roots from its existing stems.

It is difficult to establish with certainty exactly how many days the rose remained submerged. The estimated range is “anywhere from two weeks to a month after Katrina” said Matt Rowe, spokesman for New Orleans district Army Corps of Engineers, who noted the deluge likely could have included a mix of rain, storm surge from the nearby ocean and water from the wetlands.

“We don’t have records that specific to when that area was unwatered,” he added. Unwatered is a term used by the Army Corps of Engineers to describe the removal of water where it shouldn’t be.

Martin said for her the message of the plant’s survival is personal. “In my heart, I think that my mom and dad wanted to leave something to me,” she said.

When word of the rose surviving Hurricane Katrina reached Welch, he formed the idea of supporting a restoration fund previously established by The Garden Club of America and worked with gardeners and local nurseries to propagate and sell the plant.

“I was adamant about getting these roses out on the market,” Welch said.

But the tough, thornless rose needed a name.

“He said, do I have your permission to name this rose the Peggy Martin rose?” Martin recalled about her conversation with Welch. “And I said, of course.”

“You know, at that time, I’m like a zombie. I’m going through all this grief … and I was proud that he wanted to do that,” she added.

CNN reached out to The Garden Club of America and other organizations but was unable to confirm how much money was ultimately raised from the sales of the Peggy Martin rose. Popularity of the resilient plant grew quickly.

Speaking to garden and rose groups, Martin traveled to New York and California and many states in between. “I started being asked to speak, and I traveled all over this country for quite a few years,” she said. “It’s a really fulfilling experience for me. Makes me feel so good that everybody loves it.”

A rose by no other name

Now some 20 years later, the rose that withstood the brutal force of Hurricane Katrina has become a fixture in gardens and a symbol of strength and resilience. The story of the Peggy Martin rose has made its way into garden books and a children’s book. There is even a hashtag — #ShowUsYourPeggy — where owners of the rose display their blooms.

Shoup founded the Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas, one of the first nurseries that sold the Peggy Martin rose.

“I considered it to be the great beginners rose, because anybody that bought that rose from us was going to be successful,” he said. “And that’s not always the case when you’re buying roses.”

A local nursery in Dothan, Alabama, did an Instagram live in spring of 2020 about the Peggy Martin rose, capturing a lot of attention during a critical time for the garden center — as Covid-19 lockdowns were starting and their biggest sales quarter seemed in jeopardy.

After the post, “we started getting all these messages about — do you have a Peggy Martin?” said John David Boone, owner of Dothan Nurseries Greenhouse, Gardens and Gifts.

Boone’s nursery continued to sell the rose, and due to its popularity, it began hosting an annual “Peggy Palooza.” He said around “a couple thousand people” attended the weeklong event in April.

Martin has seen images of the rose across the country. “It’s so prolific, and it’s so widespread now that it just blows up Facebook … when it’s in bloom,” she said.

While it’s hard to pin down exactly how many roses that bear the name “Peggy Martin” currently exist — Grant estimates there could be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions — all of them started as cuttings Welch took from Martin’s garden.

“It’s a unique rose,” Shoup said. “The spring boom is one that is awe-inspiring, and that’s why it has gained a lot of popularity,” and a significant internet presence, he added.

Shi said he would love to have a sample to add to Kew’s collection in the UK. “Roses, they’ve been so symbolic throughout culture and society, and have been bred … for over 1,000 years,” he noted. “I think it’s wonderful that it’s symbolic of the resilience of the people of New Orleans.”

While theories about the Peggy Martin plant’s origins continue to swirl, uncovering the original name of the rose before it was lost to commerce will continue to prove difficult, Shoup said.

“We can do DNA studies on these roses now, but you have to have an original to compare it to,” he said. “Peggy is unique. And the only thing we can compare it to are other roses that are also out in the industry right now, and there has not been one that … matches up with her.”

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