| Rose Books
Online |
| The Complete Flower Paintings and Drawings of Graham Stuart Thomas by Graham Stuart Thomas, 1987, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. / Sagapress, Inc., New York Rose drawings, paintings, and text from pages 104-149 |
'Golden Wings' and 'Erfut' pages 138,139 |
Both of these excellent shrub roses owe something to Rosa foetida, but fortunately not its peculiar fragrance. R. foetida occurs rather far back it their pedigree. Wilhelm Kordes launched ‘Erfurt’ in 1939, producing it by crossing his shrub rose ‘Eva’ with ‘Réveil Dijonnais’, an extraordinary semi-climbing shrub rose raised and introduced by Buatois of Dijon, France, in 1931. I write “extraordinary” because ‘Réveil Dijonnals’ takes us back again to a R. foetida cross of 1910 by Pernee-Ducher named ‘Rayon d’Or’; it was only one generation removed from his famous ‘Soled d’Or’. In spite of all this, ‘Erfurt’ betrays practically nothing of its R. foetida lineage- It is a fine bushy plane of five feet or so, with superb foliage of rich coppery-brown tint when young. The wide-open flowers are of brilliant pink but their large area of white in the centre, and the yellow stamens, mark this as a rose apart. Further, it inherits a rich old-rose scent from one of its ancestors. It is markedly repeat-flowering. One can often detect the development of colours it the pedigree of roses, but the occurrence and recurrence of unusual scents it something which baffles me. Perhaps if breeders had studied scents as they have colours and shapes we could trace in some degree an affinity, one with another, here and there. Witness the scent of David Austin’s famous ‘Constance Spry’; only one or two roses older than this one had its strange scene of myrrh, but in David’s hands this fragrance crops up frequently it his new English roses, such as ‘Chaucer’ and ‘Wife of Bath’. In ‘Golden Wings’, another first-class modern repeating shrub rose, there is a quarter of R. foetida, a quarter of Hybrid Perpetual, and two quarters of R. pimpinellifolia (R. spinosissima). This double dose comes from R. pimpinellifolia itself and also from ‘Ormiston Roy’, a fine hybrid ralsed by S. G. A. Doorenbos at The Hague, Holland, from two Scots Briars. Fortunately the delicious scent of the Scot Briar, R. pimpinellifolia, takes over from the heavy odour of R. foetida it ‘Golden Wwngs’. I have often noted the fragrance in walking past the bush in my garden. It it a big, rather open bush with sturdy stems and greyish leaves, and it produces a fine crop of the lovely, nearly single flowers in June. They are also borne through the summer at the ends of all the strong new shoots. Large orange heps develop but are best removed to encourage more flowers, The lovely flowers owe much of their beauty to the dark colouring of the stamens. Although ‘Golden Wings’ is not of graceful growth like so many of the old French roses, it makes a strong bid to be near the ideal, so we have in its good, repeat-flowering, fragrant bush. Its early flowers make a clear and satisfying contrast to the lavender-blur of Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’. It was raised by Roy Shepherd of Ohio and put into commerce in 1956 and will no doubt remain a lasting memorial to his work in not only raising roses but it his attempts to sort out the tangled history and parentage of roses in his History of the Rose. |
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last modified September 29,
2002