“This large family is found in all parts of the world, but especially in the northern temperate regions. It varies so much that some botanists think it should be split up into several families.
“Roses are probably the best known and best loved of all garden flowers. But, though they have given their name to the family, they form only a very small part of it. Much more important to man are the fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach; and the berry-covered vines: strawberry, black-berry, raspberry. Almond fruits look much like apricots, but their seed is the nut we eat. Rose fruits (hips) are edible and were used in England during World War II as a valuable source of vitamin C.
“Medicines are derived from a number of the plants in this family: almond, wild-cherry, peach, blackberry. The leaves of burnet are a delicate addition to salads. And the wood of some trees — cherry, apple — is valuable for furniture and engraving.
“Our gardens and countrysides are full of beautiful members of the family…”
Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees… this morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering, my late bloomers flushed with their brandy. A curious gladness shook me….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring a variety of early summer roses from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in for a close look at some of the details of individual flowers, filling the frames with rose petals and buds.
I was recently amused to learn that what we call rose “thorns” are technically not thorns at all, but the botanically correct term is “prickles” — because there is a scientific difference between thorns, spines, and prickles, described in some detail in the article How Did a Rose Get Its Prickles? Well, maybe so, but rewriting the famous Poison song to Every Rose Has Its Prickles doesn’t quite work, does it?
“Roses are the favorite flower of the Christian and the Muslim worlds: varying hugely in color (but famously never blue), shape, and scent, and are loaded with cultural significance and symbolism. The ancestral rose, Rosa gallica, may have been pink, but it threw up genetic combinations for red forms early and was stable enough to be still very important in rose breeding. It dominated the gene pool of the rose until the nineteenth century….
“‘Old’ roses flower only once every year, in early summer. The Chinese R. chinensis, however, carries genes for repeat flowering, so its introduction brought about a revolution in rose breeding. However, the repeat flowering habit was recessive, which limited the breeding possibilities in the early nineteenth century, in addition to which hybrids between this species and others were usually sterile….
“[A] fertile cross was achieved in France in the 1830s and gave rise to the hybrid perpetual group. As well as flowering only once, ‘old’ roses were also only available on a spectrum from crimson to white. It was not until the 1820s that the first yellow rose species were introduced to Europe and the United States, but it took many decades before successful hybrids were created….
“The French Joseph Pernet-Ducher (1859- 1928), regarded by many as the greatest rose breeder of all time, created the first yellow roses; his hybrid tea class ‘Soleil d’Or’ of 1900 was the first ‘real’ yellow, as opposed to the wishy-washy yellows of previous attempts….
“Importations of roses from China were frequent during the nineteenth century; often they arrived on cargo ships bearing tea, which led to the roses which were bred from them to be dubbed ‘tea’ roses. Many had a touch of yellow, were well scented, and, unlike the flat blooms of traditional European roses, had a slight point in the center of the flower. This point gave each flower a very different character to what people were used to — and made the flower look particularly attractive just as it was about to burst out — a bud that spoke of promise as well as beauty. “
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet — One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret; ‘My fragile leaves’, it said, ‘his heart enclose.’ Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose.
Hello!
The roses featured in this post (and the next one) played a supporting role in one of my previous posts (see Orange and White Irises — and Creamsicles!), where I got them to pose as background color for the irises. You can see one of those irises in the first three images below, and get a sense of how many many-colored roses formed a border around them.
But with their long and complex cultural history, the roses deserved some attention of their own — so after finishing up my iris photography, I took their pictures too. They all may have been new plantings in this section of Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, or I may have just passed them by or missed their blooming season in previous years — but they were a delight to see and the combinations of yellow, red, white, and orange colors were fun to photograph. Plantnet identified the roses in these photos with several possible variant names, including Austrian Copper Rose, Wichura’s Rose, Tea Rose, and French Rose — which probably reflects the color varieties as well as the varying flower structures you can see in the photos.
The quotation from Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding at the top of this post provides a widget of early rose breeding history, including mention of an “ancestral rose” called Rosa gallica from which most of our modern roses were hybridized and developed. Rosa gallica presents a simpler form than the roses in this post — typically with a single row of flower petals similar to a dog rose or even anemone flower — but its genetic characteristics made it possible to create variants with other colors, flower forms, and blooming frequencies. In The Rose: A True History, author Jennifer Potter describes this rose as “the foundation species from which most of our garden roses have evolved.”
Now you know a little about the origin story of roses!
“All the roses of the world in their glorious variety descend from wild roses. These naturally occurring species have been recorded in literature and folklore for centuries, but their origins stretch back further beyond written history. Indeed, the very earliest roses known to science are fossils….
“There are at least three different stories explaining how [R. banksiae] came to Europe. One states that seed of R. banksiae alba-plena sown in Italy in 1869 germinated as R. banksiae normalis and was exhibited in Florence in 1874. Another story holds that the species was recorded in China in 1877 and came to Paris in 1884. There is also the tale that in 1796 a plant was taken from China to Megginch Castle in Scotland. It failed to flower due to a combination of unwise pruning and cold springs, but survived, and in 1905 cuttings were taken to the south of France where they proved to be R. banksiae normalis.
“R. banksiae normalis bears sprays of simple white or yellowish white flowers, which appear in great profusion in early summer on stems that can extend 40 feet (13m) or more. The flowers carry the scent of violets, and the effect is such that in its native China it is known as the ‘wood smoke’ rose, or ‘Mu-Hsiang’. Its preferred native habitats are valleys and rocky places near a source of water, and in Yunnan it is grown around paddy fields to help stabilise banks and keep livestock away….
“This ‘aristocratic and altogether splendid rose’ (to quote Graham Thomas) proved rather tender for the British climate, but in 1799 it was sent to the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who was a keen rose fancier. It was so well suited to the dry south-east states that it became a serious environmental problem there. In Bermuda, where it also suckers freely, it is known as ‘the fried egg’, and the Bermuda Rose Society has issued a special warning to its members: ‘Think twice before planting!!'”
“[A] late eighteenth-century addition to our complement of roses… came from China and, although the first introduction is quite well documented, it took from 1796 to 1909 to flower. Now, while R. banksiae, for this is it, does take a few years to settle down to flower well, to take over a century is excessive. The story is that Robert Drummond brought it from the Far East whence he had accompanied his brother, Admiral Drummond. The rose was planted at the family home, Megginch Castle in Scotland. There it grew but, lacking hardiness, was so frequently cut down by the frost that it had failed to develop the three-or-more-year-old thornless stems which are necessary for it to flower. Eventually, cuttings from this specimen were grown in a garden in the French Riviera: this, Mr. [Graham] Thomas asserts, was the first time the single wild white form of Lady Banks’ Rose flowered in Europe.
“It obtained its name, however, from another form and another introduction, but close enough to the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make it permissible to mention it here. One of the earliest professional plant collectors was William Kerr, whom the Royal Society sent to China in 1803. He brought from a Canton garden the double white form of this rose. It flowered near Kew in 1807 and was named after the wife of the Royal Gardens’ director, Sir Joseph Banks….
“Subsequently, first double and then single yellow forms were discovered: all are most lovely plants, especially enjoying the warmth of a Mediterranean climate. To see the soft yellow forms cascading out of high olive trees in association with wisteria, in Corfu for instance, is a magnificent sight.”
Hello!
I first discovered this Lady Banks’ Rose plant at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens last year — which means I had either overlooked it previously (this happens more often than you might think) or it was a new planting. Let’s just say it was a new planting, so it sounds more like a discovery than the overcoming of the overlooking of something. To be fair to myself, though, it’s possible I had just missed its showy blooming season, after which it was a rather ordinary looking shrub that didn’t need to be photographed.
In last year’s post, I photographed the plant in its very early blooming stages — see Lady Banks’ Rose (and Rose Mania) — to emphasize how the flowers produced clusters of yellow cone-shaped blooms at the top of single stems. This year, I took some wider photos as well — and you can gather from the images how many branches and flowers the plant produces, especially as it easily doubled in height and ground coverage since it posed for me previously. The flowers at this stage gather in very dense bunches, yet the plant overall still maintains a certain shapeliness that I’ve attempted to highlight by photographing it from different perspectives and adding some light and saturation to emphasize its forms. It occupies the intersection between two of the garden’s pathways and is surrounded by ferns, as well as the hellebores, vinca, and some of the azaleas that I photographed this year.
Its history is fascinating, though somewhat confusing — but I’ve represented a little about its introduction to Europe in the quotation above. In the second of two posts featuring this plant, I’ll include a few more historical tidbits, and describe one of the ways Lady Banks’ Rose made its way from Great Britain to the colonial United States.
From “Banksiae Lutea” in Old Roses by Graham Murphy:
“Banksian roses are named in honour of Lady Dorothea Banks, the wife of the renowned botanist, Sir Joseph Banks. These plants are vigorous ramblers, producing flexible, green almost thornless canes about 6 metres in length. Because the flowers are borne in trusses on side-shoots, most profusely when these are two or three years old, pruning involves removing any very old wood and some of the five-year-old canes, leaving the remainder to flower another two or three years. Rosa banksia lutea is the hardiest variety and flowers best on a sheltered south-facing wall; although only slightly fragrant, it is one of the world’s finest roses, with large hanging sprays of tiny, double, pale yellow flowers.”
“Britain was to play a major role in bringing Chinese roses to Europe, through the medium in which she felt most comfortable, foreign trade, spurred on by the scientific and practical curiosity of men such as Sir Joseph Banks, botanist, explorer, patron of the natural sciences, President of the Royal Society, friend and adviser to King George III and virtual director of the King’s garden at Kew….
“[The] British sent two diplomatic missions to the Chinese Emperor; the first set off in 1793, led by colonial administrator Lord Macartney and armed with much helpful advice from Sir Joseph Banks, who wanted to find out as much as he could about Chinese know-how in all spheres of science, manufacturing and the arts….
“Banks was particularly concerned to find out all he could about plants, and how the Chinese gardened.”
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered….
Hello!
Upon learning that the plant whose photos appear below was called “Lady Banks’ Rose” — also sometimes called “Banks’s Rose” and officially Rosa banksiae or Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ for deeper yellow variations — I started digging around in my books, books, and more books to see what I might discover about the plant and its history. As with all plant history stories, things get complicated pretty quickly, and the two short quotations above barely hint at the challenges involved in relocating plants from the Chinese empire to Great Britain during the Victorian era.
The second book I referenced above — The Rose: A True History by Jennifer Potter — has one long chapter devoted to the efforts of Sir Joseph Banks and others to bring plants to the west, efforts that involved some intrigue, numerous failures, gobs of money, and months of travel. In Potter’s telling, it seems that only one rose plant that would ultimately be named after Lady Banks survived the trip, a white one from which seeds and further cultivation would eventually be used to create the yellow Lutea version — which is what I think I have pictured, as even those blooms that are lighter in yellow color looked more saturated depending on the angle from which they were photographed.
As is so often the case when I go on these little research expeditions, I stumbled across a word that was new to me in the book Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders: Pteridomania. Pteridomania has nothing to do with roses (or dinosaurs, which was my first thought). It instead refers to “a Victorian craze for ferns” — a startlingly specific definition to describe Victorian obsession with the shapes and forms of ferns: fern plants; big ferns in pots and little ferns in windows; pictures, photographs, and drawings of ferns; and the incorporation of fern-form into the design elements of everything from household goods to carpet, and building structures to wallpaper. While it is equally likely that fern motifs pre-date their appearance in Victorian Britain or Victorian America, it is just as likely that any representation of ferns you might see in the design of a pot or a mirror, or a window frame or a door cornice, had its cultural genesis in the Victorian era’s pteridomania.
The idea that there was a botanical mania associated with certain historical periods was also new to me. Yes, I’d heard — and you likely have too — of “tulip fever” or “orchid mania” (which is actually and delightfully called “orchidelirium“), but I hadn’t really thought of them as distinct historical periods that intersected with or overlapped periods of botanical exploration, imperialism, and transplanting plants from one country to another. So far I’ve learned about twenty such periods from the seventeenth century onward; I won’t name them all but I imagine I could spend a lifetime studying them.
Such an intersection of history, botany, and obsession occurred for roses too: “Rose Mania” is the title of a thirty-page chapter in The Rose: A True History, which opens with the author’s rousing description of rose-wilding in Europe and the United States:
“Rose mania, which gripped Europe and America in the mid to late-nineteenth century, may not have been as sudden or as catastrophic as the tulip fever that flared among the Dutch in the 1630s, but it defined its age just as dramatically. Accumulation, expansion and conspicuous display were the new watchwords, as breeders competed to bring the newest, largest, most spectacular varieties to market, and consumers of all classes sought to acquire the latest breeds.
“By the 1880s, rose parties were all the rage in Britain (or so an editorial in the Gardeners’ Chronicle would have us believe), held ‘every day, all day long, and far into the night’. If rose parties at midday were apt to be hot, dusty and exhausting affairs, ‘Roses at break of day — a dewy one — are simply divine — so full of beauty, freshness, and fragrance, as to fill and satisfy and soothe our every sense of pleasure. Roses by moonlight offered even greater pleasures, when they seem ‘so different in colour and even form as to appear altogether new and different flowers. The perfume, too, is fuller, richer, sweeter; and perhaps, to enjoy Roses to the full, it would be well at times to meet them in the gloaming or by moonlight alone.'”
“Rose mania” doesn’t have its own fancy name like “pteridomania” — but that’s true for a lot of the floral eras, most of which are called by the name of a flower followed by “mania” or “fever”. So I thought I could make up my own name for rose mania, one you can use when you’re standing amidst a batch of blooming roses, getting pleasantly lightheaded inhaling the rose scent, all while wondering who your Victorian ancestral flower-manics might have been. Let’s call rose mania: the Rosencrazies.
