As I was working among my roses earlier this week, surrounded by the beauty and the scents of the roses, I got to thinking about the rose and our long love affair with this plant.
References to roses go back to Horace and Virgil and certainly in the poetry and prose of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Yeats. But as I explored this plant a bit further, I discovered that botanists and plant historians agree that the rose began to be cultivated five thousand years ago. They have bloomed in Egypt and were grown in Crete during the Bronze Age. Some fossil evidence indicates that roses flourished in North America at least thirty-two million years ago.
Roses can be found on Greek coins from the fifth century BC. From our history lessons, we can remember the English War of the Roses when each of the warring factions chose a rose as their emblem: the white rose of the York’s and the deep-pink-to-almost-red rose of the Lancaster’s.
They have been praised in ancient folk songs and modern music. Children have been named Rose, Rosemary or Rosie all over the world for centuries. But why are we so enchanted with this particular flower? Certainly there are other flowers that bloom longer or have a special fragrance; flowers like lavender and jasmine.
No, it is the rose that captures our heart. And there are now thousands of choices of old and new roses for our gardens. They come in colors that range from purest white to deepest crimson. The flowers can be as tiny as a dime or as large as a saucer. They can be found growing as shrubs or bushes, or small enough to be happy in a pot.
Hybridizers are even creating roses that act as ground cover. You can find them as standards, climbers or ramblers. Most have thorns but even this trait comes in a variety of sizes from wicked and abundant to few and far between.
Most of the old roses are fragrant, but a lot of the hybrids have been bred for size and shape of the flower, losing some of the heady perfume.
There are four basic groups of roses: species roses, antique roses, early nineteenth-century roses and modern roses. There are as many as two dozen families of roses within the first three groups. Each of those families has dozens of roses, too. Modern roses consist of many thousands of varieties and are the ones we see most in the nurseries.
While I enjoy the roses in a formal rose garden, I personally prefer them to be incorporated into the garden instead of setting them aside in their own garden. So I have a few roses sprinkled in among the hardy geraniums and the shrubs in my garden. This is not a new idea, and the roses in the famous English gardens of Sissinghurst have been grown this way for many, many years. It shows the individual blooms off to their best advantage and they don’t get lost among others of their kind. But it also helps keep down the occurrence of fungal diseases like mildew and blackspot that seem to torment roses grown together, especially in our damp climate.
Some of the best rose successes for me personally have been the David Austin roses. David Austin is a celebrated rose hybridizer from Britain who developed a new category of roses now known as English Roses. They are as close to a perfect rose as a gardener could wish for, having form, color, fragrance and resistance to disease, all while repeatedly blooming. They also do very well in our pseudo-English climate. My favorite is called ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, named after the wonderful English garden writer from the turn of the last century. To me, it smells like a rose should smell, i.e., like a grandmother’s parlor. It is a lovely soft pink and blooms pretty much all summer, and it doesn’t seem to mind being so close to the ocean.
A lot of gardeners shun roses because they see them as labor intensive. I find this to be a bit of an exaggeration. One rose or even two or three placed in the garden take no more care than any of the plants that need to be deadheaded, fed and nurtured. After all, isn’t that why we garden? To have things to nurture that rewards us with great beauty?
With a bloom that Botticelli, LaTour, and Georgia O’Keefe couldn’t resist immortalizing on canvas, the rose that has captured our hearts for eons deserves to be in every flower garden.
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