Stop and smell the roses Rob Mchattie grows

Rob McHattie tries to have as many people as possible stop and smell the roses that he grows. 

The St. Paul gardener has raised tea roses for many years, and he shares the blooms with neighbors and friends and the Lyngblomsten Care Center, which is across the street from his home.

McHattie, whose great, great-grandfather founded Afton, Minn., said that when he and his wife, Jane, moved into their present home in the Como neighborhood in 1983, the garden was full of all kinds of onions.

“We started planting a few roses the first year, and then more the next and more the next,” McHattie said. He now has about 100 rose plants, including 35 roses he grows at the Oak Marsh Golf Club in Oakdale.

“My wife grows all kinds of plants,” he said, “but growing roses is my hobby.”

A financial advisor by trade, McHattie has moved his office from Shoreview to his basement. “I’m kind of winding down and work part-time now, but I still have a fairly large amount going on.”

His hobby of growing roses can be time-consuming. He digs up all the roses around Halloween and puts them in trenches. He covers them with dirt and leaves and a little mouse poison to keep out mice and moles. In the spring, he digs them all up, gets his garden ready and replants them.

McHattie said Minnesota is home to hardy rose bushes that can weather the winter, but tea roses are more difficult to grow. “You can’t grow a tea rose in Minnesota unless you bury it during the winter,” he explained.

McHattie said roses do not die from freezing, but die from lack of moisture over the winter unless they are buried. 

When he was growing up, his mom grew some roses but was not very good at it, according to McHattie. “I was always trying to keep them alive, but I was not very good at it,” he noted. 

“I learned a lot of things not to do,” he added, such as Styrofoam cones around the roses are useless because the roses need moisture.

After all his years of growing roses he has thought of writing a book about it. 

“Some friends suggest I should, and I started to a couple years ago, but I had such an old computer I didn’t get far. Now I have a much better computer, but I’m too busy. Maybe this winter I will try again.”

He said the roses first bloom in June. They start with shorter stems and not as nice of a flower, but in about a month they take over and produce a rose every day. “It reaches a point where I might get three dozen a day,” he said.

When he cuts the roses, he does so at an angle. He then puts them in hot water, which opens the flower up. Then he puts them in the refrigerator for about an hour, which makes the roses last longer.

When he grows the roses at the golf club, with a trade-off that he can golf for free, he said a lot of golfers tell him they really appreciate the roses. “I used to work with finances for the railroad,” he said, “and I made sure the women all had a rose. Then the guys told me they wanted roses, too. Growing roses is fun.”

At Lyngblomsten, he makes sure there are roses at the front desk all the time. He also has given the center pots of roses and geraniums for outside the building, and he provides additional roses when there is an event such as an ice cream social or street fair. He and his Great Dane, Cinder, are frequent visitors bringing over flowers. McHattie’s wife, Jane, who is a retired registered nurse, helps at Lyngblomsten by doing patient evaluations. She also travels to Poland about four times a year to work with people over there through a Doctors Without Borders type of program. 

“That’s what she does in her retirement,” McHattie said. “I hope to keep growing roses.”

He said the roses he grows are very fragrant. 

“My favorite rose is Sheer Bliss. It is white with a lot of pink in it and it opens up real big. It has a strong fragrance, and one flower can bring scent to an entire room.”

Gwen Moulton, the receptionist at Lyngblomsten, said “Rob is one of the good guys. We so appreciate Rob and his flowers. If someone is having a bad day, they stop to smell the roses. And if someone is having a great day, they stop and smell them, too. It is just such a blessing what he does for Lyngblomsten.”