Visitors to Old Roses
By MRS.
FREDERICK L. KEAYS, Great Neck, L. I., N. Y.
EDITOR's NOTE.--In the American Rose Annual for
1932, Mrs. Keays told us much about the old roses which she has collected in
her garden in Calvert County, Maryland. Last year she translated for us an
important French text on Bengal Roses and gave suggestions for the
identification of old classes.
INTER is the season for those who love flowers to think about
gardens, to plan for next summer, and, by fanning the memory, to live the
pleasures of last summer over again. Especially is it a pleasure to think about
roses, now deeply abed under hills of earth and winter protection, with sap low
and safe, ready to mount to the warmth of spring. Many unreckoned hours go by
for me in thinking about our old-time roses so many miles south of us, in
southern Maryland; the roses of our elders and their elders and their elders'
elders, back to the colonial beginnings; just old-fashioned roses, a hundred
and fifty varieties and more, which we have gathered together because we love
to ride this hobby to the end of the rainbow. Recollection of summer hangs
richly over the sloping hillside where about four thousand rose bushes flourish
in beds and rows, their beauty set up, as in a painting of a great old lady, by
their scenic background of woods and low hills and a beautiful stretch of
water.
This rich remembering brings back
visitors to our roses. As friends, casual visitors, or strangers, they have
come. As friends to roses, they stay with us through the winter for, whether
they meant to or not, each visitor has left something, often much, of himself
with us. That is what we are thinking about now; and in recalling delightful
hours spent a-rosing with friends old, or friends made in an hour over roses,
we are finding "great refreshment to the spirit" during this silent season of
gardening. These friends come back with their in and their choices and their
enthusiasms, all as individual as their faces and their voices.
Happily, there is no fixed canon in
rose-gardening to regulate us. We do not have to plant and cultivate our
gardens by a code, legalized by the Government or dictated by professional
(13)