The giant of miniatures

Yet the paradox about America's presiding rose breeder is that, insofar as Moore is known outside specialist circles, he is famous for his modesty. He seems reluctant to take credit even for his own creations. "It is so easy to say, 'I did this,' " he says, "when in reality it would be more honest to say, 'I was there when it happened.' "

Traditionally, April is his busiest time. He, nursery general manager Carolyn Supinger and production supervisor Burling Leong must beat the bees to the spring flush of flowers, capturing the roses at the moment just before they open, selecting pollen from male parts, dusting it on flowers from female breeding lines, then bagging the fertilized flowers so no other pollen intrudes.

But for the first time since he produced his first rose hybrid in 1928, Moore wasn't out with his pollen brush this spring. He was in the hospital battling hemolytic anemia. His daughter, Eleanor Bergthold, was at his side as he returned home earlier this month. Almost immediately, representatives from UC Davis arrived to go over arrangements for him to cede his property to the university, which plans to clear the roses and sell the land to fund a chair in rose breeding, named for Moore.

Others might have stopped work, however Leong was still moving through the flowers, gathering pollen in carefully labeled jars. Supinger was still sending out spring catalogs along with bookmarks carrying the poems that come to Moore when he's among the roses.

It feels tenderly elegiac, but according to an admirer and colleague of Moore's, Scott Lohn, a rosarian and proprietor of the Uncommon Rose in Corvallis, Ore., the serenity is not resolve in the face of crisis. It's a way of life.

"Sequoia Nursery has always had an out-of-time quality," he says. "Ralph's life has been his work. He's so lost in it, he and the people around him have created a little bubble in time. They aren't looking outside. It's this wonderful little time capsule where magic has been bubbling for decades."

The day of our interview, Moore is still recuperating after the only hospitalization in his 98 years. As Bergthold welcomes the photographer and me inside the bungalow next to the nursery, there is only one caution from the bright-eyed man seated before us. "I don't hear very well," he says. He doesn't shout. In fact, for a near-deaf man, he still has perfect pitch.

It is interview as guesswork: He takes questions when he can anticipate them or when Bergthold finds the strategic angle to his ear and shouts them. Later, Supinger and an assortment of self-confessed "rose nuts" fill in the blanks.

It's instantly clear why Moore is modest: He's Central Valley farm stock through and through. Boys too big for their britches hereabouts get their rears kicked.

Not only was he born in Visalia, he says, his father was too. His grandfather came from back East as a 20-year-old. They cleared oaks, farmed cattle, grew potatoes, tomatoes and melons. On the walls are all kinds of mementos: a box with his first grafting knife, photographs of his father's melon wagon.

His father had a "unique way of selling melons," he says. "They put bells on horses, which wagon drivers would ring before going around corners. He would let his competitors sell fruit in the midday sun, and keep his melons cool all day, then at dusk, as families gathered on porches, run his horses through town ringing the bells," he says with a laugh. "By the time he turned the wagon around, and brought it back through town, families would be standing at the curb ready to try something."