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Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (4 of 4)

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From “The Banksian Roses” in Climbing Roses of the World by Charles Quest-Ritson:

“The Philadelphia nurseryman Robert Buist declared in 1844 that the Banksians were ‘the most graceful, luxuriant, and beautiful of roses.’ They are also the first to flower (a month before other roses) and among the most vigorous….

“The largest rose-tree in the world is a plant of the double white Rosa banksiae var. banksiae on the corner of Fourth Street and Toughnut in Tombstone, Arizona, which was planted in 1886. By 1969 its trunk had a circumference of nearly 2.5 m and the plant was spread over a trellis of more than 550 m. Now it is said to cover 800 m.

“Banksian roses have long been popular in China, where there are records of cultivated forms as far back as the sixteenth century. Rosa banksiae var. banksiae was the first to be introduced to the West….

“A single form with yellow flowers was introduced from China in the mid-nineteenth century as Rosa banksiae f. lutescens. It is sweetly scented (but not of violets), and its slightly larger flowers (2.0-2.5 cm) indicate that it is a hybrid with a form of R. chinensis…. Its yellow colouring, as well as that of Rosa banksiae var. lutea, probably came from a cultivated form of R. chinensis….

“[John] Lindley named the double yellow Banksian rose Rosa banksiae var. lutea. It was collected in Nankin by John Parks on behalf of the Horticultural Society of London in 1824 and has large clusters of small (1.0-1.5 cm), fully double, straw yellow flowers with a green eye. They are scentless but borne in immense profusion. The plant usually has five leaflets and few prickles. It is the hardiest of the Banksians….”

From “Rosa banksiae ‘lutea'” in A Garden of Roses by Alfred Parsons:

“A spring-flowering rambling rose, which adds its soft yellow colouring to many a wall-grown Chinese Wisteria in Britain. The two make a delicate contrast and it is as a wall specimen in warmer districts that this rose is usually found. Though hardy, it needs all the sun’s warmth to encourage it to flower well….

“The double yellow form is most frequently seen in British gardens and is no doubt an old Chinese garden favourite; it arrived from China in 1824. Strangely, the single white form of the species, Normalis, had arrived earlier, in 1796, but was planted on the wall of Megginch Castle, Strathtay, Scotland, where it grew well but never flowered. Cuttings were taken to Nice where in the warm sunshine they flowered well. A double white form… was introduced from Canton in 1807 and a single yellow ‘Lutescens‘ later in the nineteenth century….

“The two singles and also the double white have a penetrating and delicious perfume; the double yellow is also fragrant — a delicate primrose-like scent. Dean Hole, the famous rosarian-founder of the (Royal) National Rose Society, wrote of the double white that it had ‘a sweet perfume as though it had just returned from a visit to a Violet’.

“Willing as I should be to give wall space to any and all of them, I have to remember that they are very strong growers and cannot easily be curtailed. It is of course quite easy to cut their long green thornless shoots, but flowers are only produced on side shoots from two-year-old wood and thereafter….”

Hello!

This is the last of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. The previous posts are:

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 4)
Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 4)
Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)

We wrap up this series (until next year!) with close-up and macro photos of Rosa banksiae var. lutea flowers, including some that show incoming blooms with the same corymb and pedicel structure I described in the second post. Buds were a little harder to find on the yellow variant than on the white-flowering one (Rosa banksiae var. banksiae), but I encountered a few deep within the plant rather than near its outer regions. As we discussed, the yellow plant is older than the white one and tends to bloom slightly earlier — so most of its flowers were fully established on the day I took photos of both plants. The few remaining unopened buds are less extravagant than those I posted of the white variant — likely because they don’t get as much sunlight — but still reveal the plant’s visually elegant way of producing new flowers and making them available to pollinators.

Until I came across the excerpt at the top of this post, I was unaware of the Godzilla-sized Lady Banks’ Rose at the Rose Tree Museum in Tombstone, Arizona, that has been growing there since 1886. Officially designated by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest rosebush in 2001, the plant sports a trunk with a diameter of more than 14 feet — which you can see at the bottom of this page. While at first these struck me as fun and fascinating facts, they also made me realize that I don’t know if the yellow Lady Banks’ at Oakland is one single plant, and I don’t know how old it is. I do know that it’s in a well-established and deeply landscaped section of Oakland — as we can see in these photos, where the first one is from my previous post and the second is from a series I’m working on (of double daffodils) adjacent to the plot with the Lady Banks’ Rose:

The connected sections here feature plants that I know from experience have been there for many years, and have not been altered by any of Oakland’s ongoing reconstruction work. This means that the Lady Banks’ Rose could be decades old — yet I’m missing the key visual we could speculate on as evidence: a photograph of the plant’s main trunk where all the canes, stems, and flowers emerge from the ground. So we’ll have to leave this series with a mystery for now, but that a Lady Banks’ Rose is capable of building a trunk with a 14-foot diameter and live for 140 years (so far!) certainly makes the mystery a compelling one to address. There’s more discovering — and rediscovering — left to do….

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)

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From “Spring Flowering Vines” in A Southern Garden: Handbook for the MIddle South by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“Rosa Banksiae has been in the South since 1860, when it was brought to Macon, Georgia. The fine pale leaves, and bunches of small, sweet, double, yellow flowers are on smooth, thornless canes. The flowers are sweetest early in the morning before the dew is off, or just at evening. In my garden the Banksia is twined on the summerhouse with Akebia quinata….

“When March is nearly over, and April is beginning, the pale yellow roses and the curious little mauve and maroon flowers of the vine bloom together. It is a combination to be recommended. The Banksias should not be much pruned because they bloom on old wood. Any pruning that is done should be undertaken immediately after the bloom is over.”

From “Age of Hybrids: Late Nineteenth Century and After” in The Complete Rosarian by Norman Young and L. A. Wyatt:

“A Chinese importation… is the Banksian Rose, R. banksiae, which also bears small flowers in clusters, although its habit of growth is not that of the typical ramblers…. The wild, single white form was first introduced in 1796, but remained no more than a botanical specimen for nearly a century; in 1807 came the double white (R. banksiae banksia), and in 1824 the double yellow (R. banksiae lutea); the single yellow (R. banksiae lutescens) did not arrive until fifty years later….

“It was named for Lady Banks, the wife of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), traveller and naturalist, the companion of Captain Cook, President of the Royal Society, and founder of the Royal Horticultural Society. Lady Banks’ Rose, as it is sometimes called, is tender and needs a warm wall to enable it to flourish in our climate — a situation in which the true ramblers are usually very unhappy, being martyrs to mildew unless the wind is allowed to blow freely through their branches.”

Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. The first post is Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 4) and the second post is Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 4). Those two posts included photos and writing about my discovery of a Lady Banks’ Rose with double white flowers (Rosa banksiae var. banksiae) near the entrance to Oakland, festooning its guardhouse. This third post and the fourth feature the more well-known variant with double yellow flowers — Rosa banksiae var. lutea — that I’ve returned to photograph each spring for the last four years.

This photo shows the Lady Banks’ demanding attention from a distance, its abundant yellow flowers standing out against the early season greens of nearby shrubs and other plants. From here you can only see about twenty percent of the plant’s overall breadth, so I produced the first eight photos in the galleries below to show it from different angles. It has spread to fill the entire corner at the intersection of the sidewalk and roadway, packing its way into a rectangular space about fifteen by twenty feet, rising at least that many feet into the air. Its flowers and canes add color over the trunks and branches of several Crape (or Crepe, if their bark reminds you of the paper) Myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica) that have not yet started to develop new leaves or blooms. While this Lady Banks’ probably does get cut back when its branches extend into the walkways, it has largely been left to expand as it sees fit and create a seemingly endless collection of double yellow flowers.

When the name of a plant references a specific color — “lutea” in Rosa banksiae var. lutea is derived from a Latin adjective for “yellow” — I’ve learned to look very closely at the flower colors while photographing them and in Lightroom when I work on them. Yellow color in the flowers of the Rosa banksiae var. lutea is remarkably consistent: even when lighting conditions darken or saturate the colors toward what we perceive as orange, there’s actually very little orange in any one of the flowers or its petals. The yellow is nearly as pure in this yellow variant as the white is pure white in the Rosa banksiae var. banksia flowers in my previous two posts. But unlike white, shades of yellow can include a range of colors between green and orange, which our cameras capture even as our eyes assign “yellow” as a color label. And because we’re photographing biological subjects whose color production — in this case by carotenoids — is alive, the amount of color and its tones vary naturally in the plants’ cells and is also influenced by environmental conditions.

In the past when I’ve photographed the yellow Lady Banks’ Rose, I’ve edited the photos to reconcile differences in yellow color expression to approximately the same tone — an approach to color correction that is not uncommon at all, especially with a series of photos of the same subject. But this botanical subject — one whose flowers have expanded to fill six thousand cubic feet — exists in several environments simultaneously, and the lighting (and therefore the colors we perceive) can vary dramatically from one section of the plant to another. Those lighting variations, in turn, influence the level of yellow saturation we see or capture because each flower’s photographed form reflects or absorbs light in different amounts, and the entire scene captured by the camera includes ambient light bouncing from objects nearby that contribute their own color tones to the composition. So a more botanically accurate representation of a yellow Lady Banks’ Rose in photographs should take into account the context created by each single frame, with fidelity to the natural color variations visible when spending time with the plant in real life.

As you look at the photographs in the galleries below, here are some ways to observe the relationship between flower color, absorbed or reflected light, and the “mini-environment” captured in each individual frame:

  • The most saturated yellow color — trending toward orange — will be present when the scene I photographed was not shaded by other parts of the plant or by nearby trees. The colors will appear to be even more like orange for parts of the plant nearest the white-walled building you can see on the left side of some photos, because that wall reflects even more sunlight back onto the Lady Banks’ Rose flowers.
  • Those flowers that are in the shade and surrounded by the plant’s rambunctious collection of dark green leaves will appear to have light green tones on the most translucent parts of the flower petals — those which opened first, are therefore older, and are nearer the edges of flower clusters.
  • Those flowers that are in the shade but whose surroundings are more neutral or light yellow in color with very little nearby green will present a yellow blend that fades to pale yellow or very nearly to a creamy white.
  • Those taken from the furthest distance — like the first three below — register to our eyes and to the camera as just yellow, simply because we’re not close enough to see or capture the varying color tones visible close up. This is one thing that makes botanical photography so fascinating to me: what seems from a distance to be flowers of a simple yellow color is gradually revealed to contain complex color relationships combining the natural capabilities of the plant, where it grows and in what environmental conditions, and what we can observe when we give it our attention.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 4)

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From “Exuberant Gardens” in Secret Gardens Revealed by Their Owners by Rosemary Verey:

“Within a ten-acre garden carved out of pasture and woodland, with wild wetland at its boundary, the house sits with the forest guarding its back. A forty-foot-long border snakes around the house, wrapping it in a pale ribbon of silver leaves and yellow and purple flowers. Double white Rosa banksiae has escaped to climb the tower, wafting its violet scent into the upper rooms….”

From “Banksian Roses” in Climbing Plants for Walls and Gardens by C. E. Lucas Phillips:

“Lady Banks’s Rose is the wild white Rosa banksiae ‘Alba-plena’ and its yellow form is R. b. ‘Lutea’. Both are sumptuous climbers and greatly to be cherished by anyone who has a tall house with a large, warm south wall in the warmest counties only. They will grow 40 feet high (much higher in warmer lands) and flower in spring. When happy they bloom in great profusion and they do so on sub-laterals. The white one is deliciously scented, the yellow one less so but more beautiful.

“Beyond removal of the dead flower trusses, no pruning should be done for the first six years, when some of the very oldest wood should be cut out, but taking great care not to lose any strong young canes growing out of the old.

“The Banksian roses also make magnificent tree climbers where the climate is really warm.”

Hello!

This is the second of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. The first post is Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 4). As I mentioned in that post, “Lady Banks’ Rose” — attributed to Dorothea Banks — is its most well-known name, though it is also called Banks’ Rose, Banksia or Banksian Rose, or Chinese Climbing Rose.

While this post mostly features close-up photos of individual clusters of flowers, we shouldn’t miss how prolific Lady Banks’ Rose blooming can be. The photo below shows its exuberance with a wide-angle view of the plant near the top of Oakland’s guardhouse. Since a single brick is typically eight inches long, we can estimate that the span of these canes and their flowers is around ten feet horizontally and five feet vertically — an impressive amount of growth for a plant that may be only a few years old. And it maintains its structure through the strengths of its canes and branches alone; there is little for the canes to rest against for support, and Lady Banks’ doesn’t produce elements like the tendrils of vines or other hooking mechanisms to attach it to the building.

The first six photos in the galleries below show how it’s still possible to focus on one small flower cluster, despite the crowded background, and give it prominence through a combination of camera settings (shallow depth of field especially) and adjustments in Lightroom that bring emphasis to the foreground and diminish the presence of the flowers in the back. Those techniques can be used to introduce a sense of depth that wasn’t actually present in the scene at the time, but closely resembles how we might remember seeing the flowers in detail while ignoring the background.

Here we have two photos of Lady Banks’ Rose flower buds. The first image is from the previous post, where I described how seeing them led me to identify the white Lady Banks and launched a mystery into the plant’s appearance near Oakland’s guardhouse. The second photo was taken on the same day, just a few minutes later. Together the two photos tell several stories about this plant, and give us a chance to learn about some of its botanical characteristics.

Each photo shows a cluster of buds emanating together from a single point on their canes. The appearance of more individual buds in the left image than the one on the right comes about in part from their position on the plant: the left ones, nearer the ground, have canes that are thicker and more capable of carrying the weight of a larger bud cluster. Those on the right, by contrast, are nearer the top of the plant where canes are thinner so bud clusters may be smaller, but the plant will produce several clusters of similar size spaced regularly along the canes. This helps distribute weight more evenly and ensure that canes may curve and bend, but won’t break. This growth technique gives larger Lady Banks’ roses one of their most distinctive visual characteristics: your eye can roughly trace a series of downward-facing ovals that overlap and these shapes are apparent in the wide-angle photo I included above.

The overall organization of flower buds is called a corymb, a botanical term that refers to the way some flowers will grow into an arrangement that is slightly rounded or domed at the top. Each bud emerges at the tops of thin stems — pedicels — starting from a single point on the plant’s canes, with each pedicel having a different length. The varying lengths combined with the weight of individual buds cause the pedicels to bend outward and produce the dome shape. That shape ensures that the flowers will barely overlap when fully opened and will therefore be exposed to more opportunities for pollination. Intriguingly, the shapes of the bud corymbs as domes echoes the oval or circular structure of the plant as a whole.

We can also observe something about the plant’s bloom timing by comparing these two photos. An obvious difference is that the buds on the right are starting to open and reveal the five-part petal structure that’s common to many roses. But something more subtle that you’ll see once it’s pointed out is that the pedicels themselves have turned red and have produced tiny red collars at the base of each bud. This color change — from green pedicels on the left to red pedicels on the right — tells us that the buds on the right developed earlier, something that most likely happened because that photo is from the top of the plant (near the roof of the guardhouse) where it would have gotten more light.

Many plants produce cells with red or red-adjacent colors — anthocyanins — and the Lady Banks’ Rose tends to produce them mainly in its hundreds of pedicels, with the intensity of the red color varying largely depending on how much light is available to parts of the plant. Given how much space a Lady Banks Rose plant can grow to occupy, individual segments exist in micro-climates of their own, where light and access to moisture can vary significantly. As you look through the photos below, notice how the red in pedicels varies quite a bit — from slightly pink to saturated red — and you may also see what I saw: that the flower clusters with redder stems were getting more light even on the shady day I took these pictures.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!