Old Roses: There’s A Place For Old Roses in Your Rose Garden

“Of all flowers, I think a rose is best,” said Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen.

This has been man’s sentiment since he first began to garden.

Beautiful Rose GardenPin

The rose has a variety of colors, scents, forms, and landscape value for any taste. There may be no other plant giving more pleasure.

The problem is that most gardeners know only modern rose hybrid teas, which grow nakedly in formal beds.

However, a visit to a garden filled with old-fashioned and modern roses will encourage revaluation of the beauty and usefulness of the remarkable rose genus.

What Kind Of Rose Do You Want?

Do you want a shrub planting that requires a minimum of care?

Then, species and rugosas are perfect for your needs.

Is your garden shaded? 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? Your garden will be neither complete nor truly useful without some of the old gallicas, damasks, and sweetbriars.

Some would debate that roses are tolerant of shade may sound questionable. But I’ve seen rose gardens, which receive sunlight for only half a day, with magnificent specimens of musk rose and its 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 are deeper and purer in color when grown in the shade than when grown in full light. Musks also bear many hips.

Related: How To Grow Roses

Rose “Queen Of Flowers”

It’s been said that the rose is “the queen of flowers” and 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 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, many 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.

The striped ones range from the white-on-red of the ancient gallica, Rosa Mundi, 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.

Old-Fashioned Roses Loved Charming & Historic

The old-fashioned roses are beloved by many people who have never seen the plants but know them only through literature.

These old roses are still as charming as they are historic:

  • Red Rose of Lancaster, parent of many 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 to where some buried Caesar bled,” as Fitzgerald describes it in The Rubaiyat.

The damask, York, and Lancaster are less satisfactory. Its huge bush produces sparingly little, pallid, mottled pink-and-white blooms.

But the fragrance of these roses is unsurpassed for potpourri or conservation.

The Rugosas

Native of Japan and introduced in America around the 1900s, the rugosas are splendid for hedge, border, or foundation planting.

Their deliciously scented, tissue-paper flowers, ranging from white to mauve, are produced all season long.

The spent blooms produce, in turn, great crops of unusual hips.

Thus, from midsummer on, a single plant bears both fruit and flowers at once. 

Moreover, tough, wrinkled, and dark green rugosa foliage is quite disease resistant. In fact, these shrubs generally resent sprays and dust.

Other worthy shrub roses are the 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
  • Low-growing Raubritter, another German hybrid with scented, very double pink blooms resembling Bourbon roses.

The Bourbons

The Bourbons of the early nineteenth century, the hybrid perpetuals, and the Chinas still deserve attention.

The first two classes complement each other since the Bourbons are at their best in early autumn and the hybrid perpetuals in late spring.

All being repeat bloomers and amenable to pruning shears, resemble their hybrid tea descendants in growth habit and culture.

With the exception of some of the newer hybrid perpetuals, all are over 90 years old and thus should be included in any list of old roses.

Some of the most charming names in rosedom are found in these classes:

  • the Bourbon
  • Souvenir De La Malmaison
  • the Chinas
  • Old Blush and Hermosa
  • 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 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 stales her infinite variety.