The Search for the Perfect Rose

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 16, 19 October 1910, Page 41

The Search for the Perfect Rose

(By an AMATEUR ROSE-GROWER, i> the London “Daily Mail.”) [So many of us In TTew Zealand grow roses that this, though an English article, is of real interest to us in the Dominion. At all events, it is reprinted in that hope.—Ed.] French, American, English, and, above all, Irish gardeners have recently developed the art of manufacture in flowers to such a pitch that each year in a single genus several score of new “creations” are unfolded before our eyes. The keenest rosarian pants behind in vain if he attempts to keep up with the rate of production. There is no man alive who can name you at sight half the roses that now exist. It baffles the brain to hold the names and ingenuity to describe the colours. Not even with the help of such hybrid terms as “terra-cotta salmon” has description appoached the most popular of the tints, the tawny dye that floods the petals with an even subtler suffusion than was ever boasted by the old friend and notable parent, “William Allan Richardson.” It has, therefore, become necessary to simplify, to keep hold of some distinctions that are plain and few, if we are to have any knowledge of the gorgeous multitude of briars and roses which give supreme colour to the later days of June. Are these new roses any good to anyone? Had we not better come to the point reached by the Dutch bulb-growers, who have decided to leave novelty alone and set their backs to the work of growing perfectly the sorts that are ? The trouble is that most of these new roses ar e not properly hybrids; they are rather the results of cross-breeding crossbreds. Such roses concern chiefly the exhibitors at shows. In open gardens all ean wait to pick out the best of a number of years. A new hybrid perpetual is of no matter to us. The H.P.’s are so near perfection as to make indistinguishable alleged advances. But there are other - classes of hybrids that mean much to every gardener. The supreme example of the right sort of novelty is the Penzance briar. The specialists who spend their time in aiming at such productions as this, instead of “gilding relined gold” by crossing already perfect hybrids, are the real benefactors. Every rose-lover should know the history of these Penzance briars that emerged from the garden of Lord Penzance; for they are the best sign of coming glories. One parent is our native English sweetbriar, sweetest of all wild flowers, which has passed on the full fragrance of its green leaves to the offspring. This parent is of pure stock. The other parent is the hybrid

perpetual of mixed origin. Its family is old and interesting historically. The character comes from the rose of Damascus, which was probably introduced into England during the Crusades. The excellence of this rose was its power to flower again and again. All our native briars, and, so far as we know, most other roses, except the China, from which the Teas sprang, flowered once early in the summer. But the rose of Damascus, not greatly different from the common monthly rose that blossoms in a thousand cottage gardens even in the grip of winter, had this recurrent power, this supreme quality of a second bloom, which has been handed on and increased in the hybrid perpetuals, to which other parents added range of colour and numerous petals. To the astonishment of men of science and the delight of gardeners, these hybrids were crossed with the sweetbriar, to which they lent their colours, their reds and tawny yellows. The Damask, brought in the twelfth century by some Crusaders, found its right mate in the middle of the nineteenth, when French pioneers first opened out the future of the rose. We watch with admiring wonder the arched shoots of “Anne of Geierstein” flaming these June evenings in our gardens. But its sprays are as full of promise as performance. Its blooms are not yet double; it flowers, save by a sort of accident, only through one brief period. May not the time be coming when we shall have roses which in the mass serve all purposes and individually approach nearer to an inclusion of all the virtues—perpetual, sweet-scented both in leaf and flower, bright-coloured, double? Towards such ideals we approach quite rapidly. It is only sixty years or so since autumn-flowering roses, now of infinite variety, have graced our gardens. It is only eighteen years since Lord Penzance’s triumph. It is only in this century that climbing and creeping and pillar roses have reached anything approaching splendour and variety. On occasions “Dorothy Perkins” will flower into winter, and for all its creeping parentage will climb a high tree. "Rubin,” of less lusty strain, has a foliage and a flower incomparably suited; Paul’s “Carmine Pillar” outgleams for one brief spell all the roses of the garden, ami will send up a ten-foot shoot in the season. But among all these rambling roses—Wichuriana, multiflora, and the rest—the best picture, as it seems to me, of the possibility of the rose is such a rose as the “Longworth Rambler.” It is lusty as a rambler should be, but in its other virtues it is farther from the older ramblers than from the showiest of the bedding roses. Its flowers are double and well formed, singularly beautiful in a bowl, its habit of growth, the angle ami stoop of the shoots are graceful, the foliage is gracious. “Alister Stella Grey” and many others have like qualities, but the red colour and individual habit give the “Longworth” a certain pre-eminence, to the eye if not altogether to the reason. Indeed, the ideal is almost reached when all is considered. With “Nitida” to carpet the roughest space with patterns of pink and green, with a nap. as it were, not 18 inches deep; with Wichuriana to tumble in splendid profusion over banks and pillars, roses to scale posts and trees; with Penzance briars strong in growth, sweetly scented, brilliant in colour, for our hedges; with several score new sorts each year of the gorgeous exhibition roses, already described as “the extravagance of perfection,” we have not much fault to find with the “manufacturers” who combine beauties or travellers who fetch the briars from the round world. If they can add hardiness to the Teas, which seem still to remember the Chinese clime and the South French gardens of their first commingler, if they will add more weight of bloom and prolonged flowering to our pergola roses, and besides give us among the climbers a few more pure and deep yellows, as of the Austrian briar or Banksia, the ultimate ideal is nearly reached. To demand more would be “a wasteful and ridiculous excess.”