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!
