Studying the Old Roses
By MRS.
FREDERICK L. KEAYS, Great Neck, L. I., N. Y.
EDITORS' NOTE.--To look ahead is American, and we
are always doing it, especially in roses. But to look back, to find out about
old furniture, old books, old customs, old roses, is the better mark of
progress, for we have the added pleasure and advantage of realizing how the old
things really become new.
Mrs. Keays is
America's most careful old rose student, as proved by her delightful book, "Old
Roses," and by her contributions to the Annuals of 1932, 1933, 1934, 1938,
1937, 1938, and 1940.
T IS a beautiful
mid-October day. In the rose-beds, Tea roses, Chinas, the faithful old Souvenir
de la Malmaison, the Blush Noisette and her cousins, Fellemberg and
Aimée Vibert, the single Hybrid Teas, of which Innocence and Dainty Bess
are favorites, are adding their precious bit of glory to the end of the rose
season. The June-blooming roses, are a memory, Made unforgettable by what they
gave us in their high time, not only of the old familiar garden sorts which
Shakespeare loved and wrote about but other old ones.
The particular inspiration has been, for quite a
time, the study of early, hybrid roses. It is in the interest of old rose
observation and identification--if possible--that I sit here at an upstairs
window and work at the typewriter, trying to keep :my. eyes; and my thoughts
from straying into the garden.
These hybrid
roses, are not ancients, in the way of the Shakespeare roses. They are largely
about a century old. As a result of the impetus given to rose-growing by the
Empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison, there came a flood of June-flowering
roses which were hybrids. However, they were not the first variations from the
garden roses of Shakespeare's time, when roses were so limited in numbers.
During the decades between these time--Shakespeare's and Josephine's--the
varieties of roses grown in gardens moved slowly toward a hundred, counting out
the wild roses which were not considered as garden material. The Cinnamon rose
had been introduced into England from Europe and probably into America.
Centifolia had developed a white sport, and the Moss rose had developed new
shades of pink . Rosa alba had added the delicately tinted Maiden's
Blush variety at some ancient date. R. damascena had taken on the
monthly-blooming habit which probably was
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