Twenty-five years ago, Greenfield resident Will Radler introduced a low-maintenance cherry-red shrub rose called The Knock Out. He never dreamed his retirement project would revolutionize the rose industry, let alone become the best-selling rose in the United States.

“It wasn’t a color [that rose] hybridizers were looking for because it had a bluish cast,” Radler says. “At the time, the fire-engine red color was the color to strive for. But [The Knock-Out] did well, so apparently the public liked it a lot better than the hybridizers did.”

He started Rose Innovations and began propagating more plants. Since then, the former Boerner Botanical Gardens director has patented more than 50 different plant varieties, and Rose Innovations has grown into a multimillion dollar business.

Radler,

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