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!
