Roses.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 142, 16 June 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

Roses.

ALTHonou the roses, like many other highly respectable modern families, cannot claim for themselves any remarkable antiquity, their tribe is only known with certainty to date back some three or four million years to the Tertiary period of geology. They have yet in many respects one of the most interesting and instructive histories among alltheannals of English plants. In aoomparatively small space of time they have manager! to assume the most varied forms, and their numerous transformations are well attested for us by the great diversity of their existing1 representatives. Some of them haveproduced extremelybeautiful and showy flowers, as is tiie case with the cultivated roses of our gardens, as well as with the dog roses, the sweetbriars, the May, the blackthorn and meadow sweet of our hedges, our copses and our open fields. Others have developed edible fruits like the pear, the apple, the apricot, the peach, the nectarine, the cherry, the raspberry, and the plum ; while yet others again, \vhic*h arc less serviceable to man, supply the woodland birds, or even the village children, with blackberries, dewberries, cloudberries, hips, haws, sloes, crabapples, and rouenberries. Moroovor, the various members of the rose family exhibit almost eveiy variety of size and habit, from the creeping silverweed, which covers our roadsides, or the tiny alchemilla, which peeps out from the crannies of our walls, through the herb-like meadows-sweet, the scrambling briars, the scrubby hawthorne and the bushy bird cherry to the taller and, more arborescent forms of theapple tree, the pear tree and the mountain ash. As most of the Auckland residents who possess gardens are fond of the rose, I would remind them that this is the best time of the year for planting roses. If planted now the plant will have a much better chance of giving a few good flowors next season. When planting is deferred till the end of the planting season, the new plants hardly get a chance to become well established before the flowering season is on. The best of thelloweringseaeon is throughout November.