Roses: A Celebration - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865476616 ISBN 13: 9780865476615

Publisher: North Point Press, 2003

Synopsis

Thirty-three eminent gardeners on their favorite rose

Among the plant kingdom, Rosa is a relatively small genus, comprising only about one hundred species around the globe. But as these species intercross, they have given rise to as many as thirty thousand cultivars, making the rose perhaps the most various of all plants grown in gardens-and one of the most treasured.

This one-of-a-kind collection gathers together thirty-three eminent gardeners and rosarians, including Graham Stuart Thomas, Christopher Lloyd, Thomas C. Cooper, Joe Eck, Michael Pollan, Anne Raver, Page Dickey, Thomas Christopher, David Austin, Peter Beales, Dan Hinkley, and Jamaica Kincaid. Each writes about a favored rose--Rosarie de l'Ha

About this title

About the Author:

Wayne Winterrowd is the author of three previous books on gardening, and a contributing editor of The Gardener. He also writes frequently for Horticulture magazine. He and his partner, Joe Eck, are cofounders of the garden design firm North Hill.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Roses
WAYNE WINTERROWD Introduction  
 
THE ROSE,"Alice M. Coates writes in her classic Garden Shrubs and Their Histories (1964),"is not a family whose history has been neglected." Beneath her blandness one senses a certain desperation, for the history of the rose has been traced hundreds of times. Learned lectures have been given, conjecture and dispute abound, and new genetic data shift long-established assumptions. Still, what we know of the origins of the rose remains almost as lost to time as are the facts of the Trojan War. To committed rosarians, this tangled history and its confusions are fairly familiar ground. But for those who are new to roses, or who have never thought much beyond their love of them, at least the bare outlines of a long and fascinating history might be traced. It is certainly the case that other plants--Old World wheat or New World corn, for example--have exercised a far greater influence on humanity than has the rose. But among plants valued for beauty, the rose is unparalleled for its place in myth, symbol, literature, and human affection. As early as the twelfth century B.C., the Persians and the Medes carved representations of the typical, five-petaled single form of the flower as a religious emblem. If we put aside geologicalevidence, which indicates that roses were flourishing in some form or another long before our species made its appearance, this is our earliest knowledge of the flower. By the tenth century B.C., the Autumn Damask was growing on the island of Samos, where it was considered sacred to Aphrodite. Much later, it was known by the Romans as the Rose of Paestum because it grew in large numbers around the ancient temples of that fourth-century-B.C. city south of modern Naples; one temple, the Temple of Ceres, still stands. The Paestum Rose was celebrated by Virgil because of its ability to produce two flowerings, one in spring and a lesser one in autumn, making it the only repeat-flowering rose known in Europe until the introduction of the China rose in 1781. The genus Rosa is not particularly large. It contains between 100 and 150 species, depending on how finely one wishes to split botanical hairs. But the genus is remarkable for several reasons. First, its geographic distribution is remarkably broad. Though there are no roses native to South America, Australia, or New Zealand, the dispersal of the genus extends throughout the Northern Hemisphere, from China and Japan through Siberia, down to the Himalayas, and south to the Philippines. It continues from North Africa into Northern Europe, and across the Atlantic to continental North America, down to Mexico. The climatic range of the genus is enormous, stretching from almost arctic conditions to the mildest temperate zones. Such diversity reflects genetic material that is unusually capable of survival and adaptation to a wide (and ever-changing) range of climatic conditions, a heritage that comes to matter hugely in the dispersal of rose species and hybrids throughout the world. In addition to wide dispersal throughout the Northern Hemisphere, most species within the genus Rosa freely intercross with one another when brought into proximity, resulting in many notable natural hybrids. The rose that grew at the temples of Paestum, for example, maintained species identity as Rosa damascena var. bifera until modern genetic research showed it to be a naturally occurring hybrid between Rosa gallica and R. moschata. It thus represents the first of thousands of cultivated roses containing the genetic makeup of two or more species or varieties. Another natural cross resulted in the celebrated Bourbon roses early in the nineteenth century. The first of these, 'Rose Edouard,' occurredon an island in the southern Indian Ocean, known once as the Ile de Bourbon and now as Reunion. It was a spontaneous hedgerow mating between the China rose 'Old Blush' and the Autumn Damask, and it was to figure hugely in subsequent rose breeding. Several Bourbons from that period are still much valued in gardens, notably the Empress Josephine's 'Souvenir de la Malmaison,' 'Louise Odier,' 'Mme Isaac Pereire,' and 'Zéphirine Drouhin.' Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, however, most roses were either true species, the result of crosses by the hazard of proximity, or sports--the spontaneous mutation of flower shape, form, or color. That still left enough to grow, for, though John Gerard recorded only fourteen roses in his Herball (1597), the botanist John Parkinson--always the better gardener--writing in 1629, included twenty-four in his. Even with so relatively small a number, he could write that "the great variety of roses ... is much to be admired." He little knew. By 1799, Mary Lawrance was able to publish A Collection of Roses from Nature, really the first of the great rose picture books, with ninety hand-colored etchings, and by the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Empress Josephine had accumulated so large a collection at Malmaison that she encouraged Pierre Joseph Redoute in the publication of his folio volumes, four in number, containing 170 plates. The Empress died in 1814, and so she never saw the publication of Redoute's work, which began in 1817 and continued to 1824. Still, his four folios represent perhaps the greatest work on roses ever published, and mark the beginning of the keen enthusiasm that has continued to our time. It is important to realize, however, that scientific knowledge of the mechanics of breeding was not well established until Gregor Mendel undertook his work on heredity in the 1860s, after which the principles of hybridization through human intervention began to be understood. The Dutch had made a frenzy of crosses and selections in the seventeenth century, but it was not until around 1890 that a true explosion of rose varieties occurred, scarcely abating to the present day, and producing plants of such genetic complexity that the mind reels. Any hybrid bred before the end of the nineteenth century would contain the genes of several species. Rosa centifolia, for example, developed in Holland and known as Rose des Peintres because of its presence in so many seventeenth-centuryDutch floral paintings, displays the genetic material of Rosa gallica, R. phoenicia, R. moschata, R. canina, and R. X damascena. But when modern cytologists examine a recent hybrid--'Tropicana,' say, or 'Sterling Silver'--they may find evidence of a dozen species or more, and countless hybrids among them, reflecting what Hugh Johnson in The Principles of Gardening (1979) calls "a cocktail of inextricable complexity." That brings us to the third remarkable fact about the genus Rosa. No other in the entire botanical kingdom reflects so long, so persistent, and so devoted an intervention by the hand of man. Written records of the cultivation of roses extend back more than five thousand years from the present, but there is ample though unwritten evidence of an even longer history, particularly in China and the ancient Middle East. One might suppose that the extraordinary beauty of the rose accounts for its elevation above all other flowers. However, the deliberate cultivation of flowering plants for their beauty appears to be only a periodic occurrence in Western history until the classical Roman period, when gardening as we in the West understand it began. (In China it is of older date, and the China roses--which would prove so important in nineteenth-century breeding for their characteristic of repeat blooming--already represented a complex but unrecorded series of crossings, intercrossings, and selections by the time of their arrival in Holland and England in the late eighteenth century.) In fact, no other plant of pronounced flower beauty was cultivated through the early Middle Ages, with the possible exception of the lily, the status of which was assured in monastery gardens because of its iconographic association with the Virgin Mary. Roses, however, along with fruits and herbs, are among those few plants that possess both aesthetic and economic importance. It is a peculiarity of some roses, most particularly Rosa gallica var. officinalis, the Apothecary's Rose, that the fragrance of their petals endures long after they are dried, and a belief in the therapeutic properties of this fragrance exists from earliest human history down to the present time. The late Middle Ages practiced its own version of aromatherapy, equating pungency with efficaciousness in the treatment of disease. So the strong fragrance of some rose petals when harvested and dried was judged both healthful and delightful--no dichotomy in a world where the malodorousness ofpoor sanitation and the occurrence of ill health went hand in hand. Huge numbers of R. gallica officinalis plants were cultivated from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries around the city of Provins, southeast of Paris, and their petals were harvested and processed into pastes, oils, and unguents, producing a veritable pharmacopeia of remedies for all human surface ailments, including damaged skin, ulcers, wounds, amputations, and eye injury and disease. An awareness of the rose as a medicinal plant was most likely brought home by the first Crusaders from North Africa and the Middle East, where knowledge of the therapeutic, culinary, and olfactory benefits of rose petals had been passed down from the ancient classical period. Without fixatives or complex chemical manipulation, few flowers lend themselves so well to preserving. Even before the Middle Ages, in Turkey and the Middle East, the process by which certain roses could be made into conserves, powders, or waters was well understood, resulting in products that were healthful in themselves and could also be used to flavor sweets and prepared dishes. The cream-filled pastries heavily scented with rose water that are sold in Greece and Sicily, and some...

About this edition

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0865476616
• ISBN 13: 9780865476615
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Winterrowd Wayne
• Illustrator: Stagg Pamela