“Competitive? Oh yeah, with just about everything. When I first got into roses, I got me a garden log. Inside the cover I wrote: ‘I love roses and I love the competition and I’m going to grow the best God damn roses I can.’” Jeff Stage grins – a thousand watt, big-toothed smile set in a blizzard of beard.

Jeff is a retired Navy sheet-metal mechanic who has been in roses since 1981. That was the year that he built a porch onto the side of his house in order to grow the queen of flowers. No, he didn’t know much about them, but he liked to garden and had heard that roses did well in the San Diego climate. So, he ordered eight or ten pretty ones from Jackson & Perkins, including a white hybrid tea named ‘Honor.’

“I didn’t know anything about growing them except that if you throw Bandini Rose Food at them and water ‘em regular, they grow. I planted ‘Honor’ up under the eaves of the house and six weeks later it was so big that I couldn’t see out of my picture window. I was feeding Bandini Rose Food every three weeks and the roses were trying to walk out of the yard.

Anyway, I was sitting in the shop one day when this carpenter came by and said ‘What are you doing with that rose catalog?’ I said, ‘I’ve ordered some from this Jackson & Perkins place and they’re doing real well.’ He guessed that I’d bought ‘Double Delight’ because everybody was getting it then. Then I told him I had an ‘Honor’ that was over my head. He says, ‘You’re lying.’ I said, ‘I’ll have my wife Patty take a picture of me standing in front of it.’ I did and when I showed it to him, he said, ‘Damn. You do grow ‘Honor.’’ I said, ‘What’s the big deal? It grows like a weed.’ He said, ‘I can’t get mine past my knees.’ As it turns out, he’d been growing roses for twenty-three years. Carl Mahaney. He became my first mentor.”

Carl told Jeff to bring some blooms to the San Diego rose show.

“I hauled out every pot and pan in the house, filled them with water, put my roses in and loaded them into the back of my car. I was driving a Datsun 240-Z at the time. When I got there, roses and water had flopped all over.” The 240-Z was a race-car look-alike with a high-rev engine and a tiny hatchback trunk – not rose-friendly. Nonetheless, Jeff won two blue ribbons. “I said, ‘Man, I can do this!’”

The following weekend, Carl and Jeff drove to a show in Arcadia. This time he won the Novice Trophy.

“That’s when I knew that I wanted to exhibit roses. I wanted to compete. I went home and started digging. From the end of April until the first week of November, I dug an average of six hours a day. On weekends, I dug for ten or twelve hours a day. I dug up thirty yards of dirt, dumped it all into the canyon behind the house, replaced it with good loam and benches for pots.”

When he wasn’t digging, he read ten years worth of the American Rose Society magazine back issues.

“I would dig, read, go to work; dig, read, go to work.”

“What did Patty say?”

“She thought I was nuts. She told her friends at work that I’d gone crazy on roses. They told her, ‘Don’t worry; it’ll last a couple of years.’ Isn’t that sweet? A couple of years!” Jeff roars with laughter.

The miracle may be that Patty laughs too.