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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.”

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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!

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From “Rosa banksiae” in Trees and Shrubs by Ernie Wasson:

“Near-evergreen in mild climates, this once-flowering climbing rose from western and central China is now seldom cultivated, though its double-flowered varieties, the white Rosa banksiae var. banksiae and the yellow Rosa banksiae var. lutea are very popular. The species can grow to over 30 ft (9 m) high or wide but regular trimming will keep it compact and shrubby. It blooms from spring to early summer, producing massed sprays of small white flowers.”

From “Rosa banksiae” in Some Like It Hot: Flowers that Thrive in Hot Humid Weather by P. J. Gartin:

“Banksian roses are native from north-central through southern China. The wild version has small, white, single flowers that smell intensely of violets. A double yellow variety (Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’) was discovered in the Canton province and presented [in England] in 1824. This is the Lady Banks rose that most people associate with Deep South gardens….

“Lady Banks ‘Lutea’ has soft yellow flowers with a green eye. Blossom size is quite dainty at only 3/8 – 5/8 inch in diameter. Although they are not scented, the bloom is always copious. This is the perfect plant to weave in and out of a fence or trellis because it will not bite the hand that cares for it; it is practically thornless. ‘Lutea’ is the hardiest of the Lady Banks roses although temperatures below 15 degrees will kill it. Like the rest of these roses, it is practically impervious to disease.

“The double white version, ‘Alba Pena’, which is sometimes designated as R. banksiae banksiae… is not quite as hardy as Lady Banks ‘Lutea’ and has a few more thorns. However, its 5/8 – 3/4-inch flowers have an intense violet fragrance…. Lady Banks roses flower on second and third year growth and they are not repeat bloomers. They are fast climbers that will reach 15 – 20 feet in height….”

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Hello!

This is the first of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. “Lady Banks’ Rose” is the most frequently used common name for plants in this species, a name attributed to honor Dorothea Banks, the wife of nineteenth-century botanist and plant explorer Joseph Banks. You may also encounter it under the names Banks’ Rose, Banksia or Banksian Rose, or Chinese Climbing Rose when it’s discussed in conjunction with other roses originating from China that exhibit climbing or vining characteristics.

I was very familiar with a Lady Banks’ Rose that produces double-yellow flowers — Rosa banksiae var. ‘lutea’ — from previous photoshoots when that was the only Lady Banks’ Rose on Oakland’s grounds, singly representing its presence in the southeast and availability at local garden centers. I had timed my photoshoot specifically to hunt down that plant with yellow flowers and observe how it’s changed over the years, and then….

As I entered the property’s main entrance and passed the guardhouse (originally called the Watch House), I saw what looked like a flowering vine that I assumed was jasmine or something similar (which I’d never photographed), as that’s what I’d seen growing there previously. From a bit of distance, the white flowers and green leaves against red brick caught my eye, with their strong color contrasts apparent on an overcast day — contrasts that would typically attract my attention, just like they attract Oakland’s insect pollinators.

I almost kept walking by — I was on a mission after all! — but decided to take a closer look, and saw these…

… very distinctive flower buds that I recognized from my earlier photography work on Rosa banksiae var. ‘lutea’ — the yellow variant. Where this plant came from, and when, became an immediate mystery, as I’ve walked this route from the main entrance multiple times every spring for years, but this was the first time I’d seen this Lady Banks’ Rose with double white flowers — which I now know to be Rosa banksiae var. banksiae — in bloom.

Despite having thousands of photos of plants and architecture from Oakland going back to 2007, I didn’t have a single photograph of the guardhouse that I could use to anchor on a timeframe, or even confirm what I vaguely remembered twining up the building’s arches. Skulking around the internet, I eventually found an image of the guardhouse duplicated on several sites (possibly a shared stock photograph) showing a vine emerging from the ground near the rain gutter’s downspout. Those images resonated with my memory of a thin, scraggly plant with a few randomly spaced pink flowers toward the top — and at least confirmed that the white double Lady Banks’ Rose replaced a previous occupant growing in the same place.

If we interrogate the plant and its photographs now, we can come up with a reasonable hypothesis about its genesis here and its age. In this photo from my next series…

… notice the size of the cane structure on the right. The largest one is three to four inches in diameter as it has expanded to support the weight of the plant’s central spine while extending both vertically and horizontally and winding up the building. The plant’s process here is similar to the way a tree builds growth rings — layering new rings of increasing diameter as the plant’s height and weight increase.

The Lady Banks’ Rose is known to expand the diameter of these supporting canes at a rate of about an inch per year, and is also known to produce its canes and stems for three to five years before it develops its first flower buds and its first exuberant blooming cycle. These botanical characteristics suggest that the plant was added to this location as many as five years ago — likely around the same time as some completed guardhouse renovations — and this could be its first year in bloom. Taken together, these observations explain why I’d never seen it before despite passing the guardhouse to engage with its yellow-flowering relative every spring since 2022.

With that mystery solved reasonably well, we can now talk about the photos in this four-part series. Since it was the brick and plant color contrasts that got my attention to begin with, I’ve used this first post to highlight the plant’s growth patterns against the brick columns and walls in its background. In the second post, we’ll see more of its flowers and buds close up. In the third and fourth posts, we’ll switch from Rosa banksiae var. banksiae to Rosa banksiae var. ‘lutea’ — from white to yellow — and observe some of the differences between the two, visually and botanically. Throughout all the remaining posts, we’ll also explore their use in gardens, their significance to memorial gardens like Oakland, and their botanical and cultural history.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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