for us, came from northern New York State. How many times we had read about a Hebe's Lip, classed as a Hybrid Sweetbriar, and longed to find it! The Sweetbriar is such a darling rose, and the oldest varieties have all been lost. There is confusion some-where, but we let it lie, like a bad rumor, and go ahead, calling Hebe's Lip a Damask rose. It is not the flower which puts the plant into the Damascena family, but the foliage and the prickly shoots and habit of growing. Really the bloom is open, double, and flat, quite like a Gallica rose. Miss Willmott says that Hebe's Lip is heavily endowed with Gallica ancestry but classes it as a Damascena and denies it ever could be a Sweet-brier. The charm which gives this rose its lovely name is the coloring-petals of a faintly creamy white with a margin of the most youthful, healthy carmine--Hebe's exquisite Lip!
     No one seems to know just how ancient a garden rose Hebe's Lip is. As far as foliage and form and lost heritage go, we may say that our next rose-coming to us from the same planting as Hebe's Lip--might be called a Damascena, although there is some mixture here, perhaps. Very unexpectedly this Crimson Velvet rose shot a flash of ruddy light in our garden, as we thought we were tending a rose of a named variety. The full, expanded, flattish bloom, with petals neatly laid out in even regularity, bearing a few tiny flecks of white here and there on the velvety, dark crimson surface, gives a wonderful significance to the plant. Anything seems possible! Starting with the old herbalists, Gerard and Parkinson, both of whom wrote about the Red Velvet rose, trailing through the years to Ellwanger of the late nineteenth century, we are defeated in finding a perfect and detailed description to fit this royal beauty. In "Roses for English Gardens," Miss Jekyll speaks about the Damask class "charming with its delicious though fainter scent and its wide-open crimson flowers," and goes on to say, over the page, "There were formerly in old gardens some very dark-coloured Damask Roses called Velvet Roses, that are either lost or have become rare, as they are seldom seen." Old, unidentified, suggestive of much speculation, our brilliant Crimson Velvet rose has become a precious problem.
     This past spring there was news in one of the English garden-ing journals that the pale pink, full Damascena, Prolifera, had

been discovered and restored. It was called Prolifera because the rose grows a complete bud from its center. Gallicas, Centi-folias, Mosses, and Damascenas will perform this weird ex-hibitionism under circumstances which suggest an impulse to show off a stunt, while sacrificing the setting of seed. Once a pink Moss grew such a bud for us. For two years we have watched the bloom on three rose plants we brought from Deposit, N. Y. Last year they bloomed as young plants, and taking everything noted into the reckoning, we felt fairly cer-tain that they were a variety classed as Gallica, called D'Aguesseau--fully cupped, brilliant carmine--the D'Aguesseau which by its shimmering glory made a rose convert of Dean Hole. This past summer, the three plants, grown much larger, much handsomer, and more assertive, bore dozens of fine roses which went proliferous with three, four and five buds coming from their centers, some buds with power of expanding. It was almost an awful spectacle! The distinction is not a lovely one, and the performance has upset all suspicion that we have a lovely, refined rose, named for some elegant Frenchman and associated with that eminent English clergyman. We find, in reading about this infraction of good blooming, that roses sometimes go proliferous not only by the horizontal method ours displayed, but also by a vertical system of buds in tandem, which all goes to show that the rose can be very foolish.
     We would like to speak about several wise and genteel roses--about a full white China rose, as round and daintily figured as a Chinese carved ivory ball; about two restorations in the Prairie rose family to which Baltimore Belle and Queen of the Prairies belong; about many fascinating Tea roses, among them Bougère, 1832, one of the earliest; about puzzling early Hybrid Perpetuals; but there is a June-into-July-blooming rose demand-ing a present hearing because of its fixed differences from all others we have grown or looked upon critically. The stranger takes the stage.
     In June, 1934, we saw this lovely stranger for the first time. The bush has an ancestry of at least a hundred years, but back of that we know nothing. The bush we saw was flowering heavily, with large pink roses in clusters of eight or more, from ends and laterals, on shoots six feet high, bold, straight, covered