INTER is the signal for a garden review by the open
fire-- time to take out notebooks and pictures and the books about roses--time
for detailed checking with authorities and for telling ourselves what to look
for on the bushes when June comes again. Every year we remark that it is quite
surprising how many old-fashioned roses, their names usually forgotten, turn up
in one summer. While every season brings its parcel of new pleasures in this
hobby of collecting and restoring old roses, sometimes a summer's crop
surpasses, as has been the case this year.Blooms of this past June have been richer in interest than usual, some because they were especially exquisite, such as two very refined and beautifully tinted Centifolias; some lovely Moss roses in shades of pink and red; several because they presented something intricate, demanding more searching into the study of characteristics in order to make out where they belong in the great rose family.
The roses which have been most interesting in this past season's group have been "family roses," as apart from completely lost ones-roses brought from old settlements which have kept their homes and gardens-rural New England, northern New York, Michigan, southern Maryland, and Virginia. This brings to mind what a friend said, "If you want to find the' good things-roses, pewter or bedsteads-visit substantial old settlements which have remained placidly apart and intact." Grandmothers and great-grandmothers seem to have had a fondness for the Alba group of roses which Lindley, in 1820, considered the most beautiful. Albas are less imposing than Centifolias or Gallicas but have a sweeter refinement. Many old gardens have a bush of the White Rose of the House of York (Rosa alba flore-pleno), with attractive blue-green foliage, its full, compact flower opening often with a faint, quickly passing flush of blush-pink--a rose of purity and composure. As a white rose it is much more pleasing than the white Centifolia or even the white Moss.
Many old ladies with minds trailing back into happy memories like to have an "old blush rose," the pale Maiden's Blush. While this rose is always spoken about as being blush, it is not a pale pink, but a blush we might call "blush-mulberry"--what Parkinson, always particular about his descriptions of color, describes as "of a bright, pale murrey color." Maiden's Blush is a handsome rose, and of a delicate and pleasant fra-rance. It is the "Rosa incarnata" of the old herbalists.
Less often found, but much admired, is the deeper pink Alba, the "Rubicunda," the old Celestial, a gay, charming sort. Its history is lost in a misty antiquity, as is that of both the white and the "bright, pale murrey." Having had these three Alba roses before us for several years as familiar old friends, we have looked at another Alba, more pink than Maiden's Blush, more lilac than Celestial, a rose we call University, because it grows where the workmen's cottages are said to have stood when the University of Virginia was being built. Coloring, form, habit, and the like, are like the description of an Alba called Due de Luxembourg, but we recognize that there is much confusion in the Alba family.
This past June, an Alba rose whose history goes back a hundred years in one family and centers about Salem, Mass., produced roses we had not seen before. Its foliage and habit of growth suggested that probably we had just another Flore-pleno, but its pushing flower-buds said not. The sepals frilled out into a more foliated decoration, and the hip took on more of an urn-shape--small points, but different. The bloom surprised us, for never before had we seen an Alba with a good bit of pale yellow in its center, upon opening, but there it was, over and over. After spreading out on tables and chairs all the books we have, open at Rosa alba, we made the grand tour of varieties and settled down with William Paul of 1848, calling our rose Blanche Belgique, with "flowers white, their centers tinted with sulphur, of medium size, full; form compact; habit branching; growth moderate; foliage dark green." While our foliage is dark blue-green, the description fits, and is the only one that does fit. At least, for the present, we rest on that--another identification.
Another rose, its ancestry located in New England, now growing in a Long Island garden, from which we secured a plant, has a few points indicating some Alba features, but many more points indicating Gallica derivation, important among the latter being the circular form and open fashion of the bloom. That being the case, it is fair to suppose this rose would be classed as a Gallica. These early hybrids, of which numbers survive, present much confusion, but we must follow the way of the old masters who classed their roses according to their dominating characteristics. The bud of this so-called Gallica showed spots of carmine on the opening petals. We watched the flower unfold and found that the large, flat bloom, with its typical ring of golden stamens, carried blotches of carmine on its lively rosy pink petals. Mottled this way, the rose would, no doubt, belong in the group of variegated Gallicas, a much-admired sort a hundred years ago. It may be Phenice, a hand-some pink variety, striped and variegated with carmine-as William Prince described it, "cherry-spotted with a roseate center." We search diligently for another pink Gallica of a gay shade with blotches of carmine, and find none such within the precincts of our sleuthings, so we make a note to watch this rose another year and check it up again. The French rosemen grew by far the greater numbers of these bizarre roses in the days of their immense vogue. English and American rosemen . sold them almost as soon as they were released for sale. Phénice was sold here, as old lists indicate.
Even more
fascinating than running down records of Phenice, has been verifying a sweet
rose classed as a Damascena and called by the delicious name of Hebe's Lip.*
This rose, named 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 with strong, wrinkly, veiny, somewhat shining foliage. In the autumn we got two well-advanced suckers. These have bloomed for two years under our insatiable scrutiny; not so freely in 1935, beginning about June 25; very gorgeously during this past summer, beginning a little earlier and continuing several weeks. Now our bushes are pushing up and spreading and will be six feet high another year. In 1935 many- strange characteristics stared at us, but we recorded these points with restraint and waited to make sure that the differences held true.
New upright stalks of this year, as of last year,
are well prickled up with large and smaller red prickles--no bristles--on a
smooth, pale, whitish green bark. When the blooming shoots break out next year,
as of this year and last year, they will have one or two or no prickles, but
the peduncles of the blooms will be covered with bright red, bristling hairs.
These hairs extend to the calyx, which is a rather shallow affair, shaped like
a thimble or a turban, instead of a nice globe. The young prickles on the new
wood do not mature in quantity, and we find the old wood not very thorny. On
both young and old wood, the leaves are made up of nine leaflets quite as often
as they are of seven and more often than of five, the end leaflet being
frequently two and a half inches long, while the pair at the base end may be as
small as a fingernail. The flower is finely circular in outline, full, petals
curling over on the edges, slightly drooping; the cupped bloom is very pretty
viewed from any angle. The pink is rosy, not harsh, deeper than the back of a
Radiance petal; sometimes the color shades off a little on the edges but is
fairly constant. The fragrance is old-timey.To come to any sort of understanding with this foreigner in our garden, we had to retrace our path into the history of rose families so we might locate the red bristling hairs, the turban, the nine leaflets, and the whitish green young growth, as well as the red-dyed young foliage. We found ourselves going back to Clusius, who in 1583 described a rose he discovered growing at Frankfort-on-the-Main. There followed a succession of records of this rose by other writers. In 1820 Lindley described a rose he called Rosa turbinate, saying that the rose has many as-pects of the Damascene but its turbinate calyx and reddish hairs set it apart. In "The Genus Rosa," Miss Willmott calls it Rosa francofurtana, and says it is believed to be a spontaneous cross of the Cinnamon rose and Gallica. Here, however, we are brought to a halt on our path, as we find that this Frankfort rose has only five leaflets, with everything else about right. We must look for variations. We go to Redouté's "Les Roses" and find several varieties but nothing conclusive.
The Frankfort rose never became so important as the four great June-blooming classes, Alba, Gallica, Centifolia, Damascena, but the old French hybridizers played with it and developed some distinct varieties, now probably rarely seen. The longer-than-usual blooming period of our rose and the red coloring in young foliage might mean that we have a Frankfort rose hybridized with a China, of the Hybrid China class.
It is always interesting to find out whether a rose was sold in this country. Of the several lists available, that of Prince's Linnean Gardens offers the richest field, for at one time Prince's nursery had a very extensive planting of species and garden roses. William Prince, third in line in the business, gives the names of four Frankfort or "Turban" roses, among them Ancelin (listed by William Paul in "The Rose Garden" of 1848, as a hybrid China with positive Frankfort characteristics). Ancelin is described as being "Very large, deep rose, elegant"--perhaps too deep a shade for our rose. One called Aristote is said to be "large, rose, with white border." We must find out more about these Frankfort varieties before another June!
And so goes on this fascinating search into the roses of bygone times.
*See Plate facing page 19 as engraved from illustration in Miss Willmott's "The Genus Rosa," where it is named as Rosa damascena, var. rubrotincta.