“Of all flowers, me thinks a rose is best,” said Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen. This has been man’s sentiment since he first began to garden.
The rose has a variety of colors, scents, forms, and landscape value for any taste. No other plant gives more pleasure.
Yet most gardeners know only modern hybrid teas, which they grow nakedly in formal beds.
A visit to Will Tillotson’s garden of old-fashioned and modern roses in Watsonville, California, will encourage a revaluation of the beauty and usefulness of the great rose genus.
- Do you want a shrub planting that requires a minimum of care? Species and rugosas are perfect for your needs.
- Is yours a shaded garden? There are roses for you also.
- Do you want something stunningly different in color?
- Why not try some of the striped and particolored roses in pink, red and plum tones?
- Is the mixed herbaceous border your ideal? Use roses for accent and background.
- Are you an herb-garden enthusiast?
Growing Roses To Complete The Garden
Your garden will be neither complete nor truly useful without growing roses, like some of the old gallica, damasks, and sweetbriar rose.
That some roses are tolerant of shade may sound questionable.
But in Mr. Tillotson’s garden, which receives sunlight for only half a day, there are magnificent musk rose specimens and hybrids.
Musk Hybrids
With its indefinably fragrant masses of small, star-like flowers, which appear once each year, the musk covers an immense area with great arching canes.
But its hybrids, with white and light-or deep-pink blooms, are suitable for small gardens.
The blooms have a musk odor and when grown in shade are deeper and purer in color than when grown in full light.
Musks also bear many hips.
The Queen of Flowers
Along shaded Brown Valley Road, Mr. Tillotson has some climbers (effective as “running roses”) and several rugosas, gallica, and other species.
It is a dictum that the rose, being “the queen of flowers,” should be grown separately from other plants.
But nowhere is the rose as regal as in the mixed perennial border. Here at the back or midway of the border, the sweet-smelling, old-fashioned varieties, best left unpruned except for occasional thinning can fountain beside delphinium, lilies and iris, dianthus, and a few other gray-leaved accent plants, such as lavender.
Old-Rose Foliage
Old-rose foliage plays its part in the color harmonies, being variously light to dull gray-green. Even the thorns vary in sharpness and color.
And besides providing masses of soft off-white to deep violet in early summer, wide varieties, including several mosses, repeat their bloom.
Such a border is the ideal setting for the striped members of the rose family, delightful flowers with a period quality as definite as that of the mosses.
Galicia and Damask Group of Roses
The striped ones range from the white-on-red of the ancient gallica, ROSA MUNOT, through pink-on-red and purple-on-white to the deep silvery violet tones of BELLE DES JARDINS and CAMMEUX.
Others of the gallica and damask groups qualify, with their mixtures of shimmering, overlapping tones, which deepen as the blooms mature.
Garden effects are magnificent if these roses are planted by one who has an eye for color blends and contrast.
Beloved Old-Fashioned Roses
The old-fashioned roses are beloved by many people who have never seen the plants but know them only through literary associations.
These old roses are still as charming as they are historic:
- Red Rose of Lancaster, parent of most garden roses
- Great White Rose of York or Jacobite rose
- Eglantine, with its apple-scented, deep-green foliage on strong canes
- Damascene, whose exquisite, translucent carmine
“Never blows so red . . . as where some buried Caesar bled,” as Fitzgerald describes it in The Rubaiyat.
The damask, York and Lancaster, is less satisfactory, with its huge bush producing sparingly little, pallid, mottled pink-and-white blooms. But the fragrance of these roses is unsurpassed for potpourri or conserve.
Rugosas
The rugosas, native to Japan and introduced in America at the turn of the century, are splendid for hedge, border, or foundation planting.
Their deliciously scented, tissue-paper flowers range from white to mauve and are produced all season long.
The spent blooms produce, in turn, great crops of unusual hips. Thus, from midsummer on, a single plant bears fruit and flowers at once.
Rugosas foliage—tough, wrinkled, and dark green—is disease-resistant. In fact, these shrubs generally resent sprays and dust.
Worthy Shrub Roses
Other worthy shrub roses are the recent introductions of the German hybridist Kordes:
- FRUMANGSGOLD, with great semi-double, creamy blossoms on a splendid tall bush,
- FRUHLINGSMORGEN, apple-blossom pink, blooming a second time in the fall.
Another German hybrid is the low-growing RAUBRITTER with scented, very double—pink blooms resembling Bourbon roses.
The Bourbons of the early nineteenth century, the hybrid perpetual, and the Chinas are still deservedly popular.
The first two classes complement each other since the Bourbons are at their best in early autumn and the hybrid perpetual in late spring.
All three being repeat bloomers and amenable to pruning shears, resemble their hybrid tea descendants in the growth habits and culture of roses.
Except for some of the newer hybrid perpetual, however, all are over 50 years old and thus should be included in any list of old roses.
Most Charming Variety Names
Some of the most charming variety names in rosedom are found in these classes:
- The Bourbon – SOUVENIR DE LA MALMAISON,
- The Chinas – OLD BLUSH and HERM0SA, and
- The exquisite silvery pink – LA FRANCE, the oldest hybrid tea.
With their heavy, incurved, intensely fragrant flowers, these varieties have an opulence that is very expressive of their era.
However, if one wishes to grow the various members of the rose family, the genus is ready to oblige.
As Shakespeare said in Antony and Cleopatra, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
44659 by Alice Gregory