The Fashionable Rose : The History of the Genus <i> Rosa</i> Since the Turn of the Century

THREE ROSE GARDENS dating from around the turn of the century can still be visited today. We can go to the country around Paris to see two period-piece gardens. The Roseraie de l’Hay remains substantially as it was, a mirror of garden design and the choice of roses of the period. The other garden, Bagatelle, was designed in 1907. The former is a triangular plot with arched vistas and a dense array of beds, all filled solely with roses. The latter is a gracious formal design punctuated with topiary. About 1900 the German National rosarium was laid out at Sangerhausen, now in East Germany. This is less formal but contains a prodigious number of varieties.

The two French gardens exhibit every known way of displaying roses. Many of the beds are surrounded by box edging and may even have clipped grass in them around the roses. There are arches, treillage, pillars, swags, rustic work, standards and weeping standards. This is something that has only been done with the one genus, Rosa , and has been copied in Britain. It is as though we cannot have enough roses. Until the hybridizing began with ramblers of the Synstylae section, and climbing sports of other roses cropped up, there were very few rambling and climbing roses. Even so, they could not be given the walls in the kitchen garden, which were fully covered with fruit trees, so these artificial means of displaying the roses on supports gathered favor. This is an example of how the rose influenced garden design.

Many of the more perpetual-flowering of the new hybrid roses were weak growers and were even recommended to be planted at 9 to 10 inches apart. Greater height was needed for some of the beds. Just as the bedding plant schemes had needed taller “dot” plants, so was the rose made to follow suit by being budded on stems of an understock. Thus quarter-, half- and full-standards were born; when interspersed among the dwarf roses, a four-tier system evolved, creating something quite new, a bank of color. The rambler roses were given extra-tall stems--in the French gardens they are neatly pruned into mops, and in England the metal umbrella was a new scheme that gave rise to weeping standards. With no other genus has such artificiality reigned.

This use of the roses for garden display was not what was admired by the founders of the Royal National Rose Society. Their ideal was a series of long straight beds containing rows of different kinds of mainly hybrid perpetual roses, with one desire--the production of prize blooms for the show bench. Neither style pleased William Robinson. Against these ideals he launched his fulminations in “The English Flower Garden” in 1883, and elsewhere in his prolific writings. There is no doubt that, starting life as he did in the potting shed, so to speak, he educated himself to a high degree and was able during his long life to write very convincingly about many and varied aspects of gardening. He abhorred roses in beds by themselves and advocated growing them in mixture with other plants. He claimed that the rightful beauty of many of the old garden roses was, by excess pruning, being denied them--in fact, that many of them were being given up in preference to little bushes that produced blooms for exhibition. Further, he foretold early mortality in the new rose gardens--other plants should be grown around them in order to shade the soil.

Robinson’s writings came in time to prepare the way for the pen of Gertrude Jekyll. From her “Roses for English Gardens” of 1902 is extracted the following quotation: “We are growing impatient of the usual rose garden, generally a sort of target of concentric rings of beds placed upon turf, often with no special aim at connected design with the portions of the garden immediately about it, and filled with plants without a thought of their color effect or any other worthy attention.” In her garden was developed another idea for the use of rambler roses: that of training them into trees in order to achieve a natural effect instead of one that was artificial. But in the main she used the older shrub roses, the stronger bedding roses and the newly introduced species.

Ellen Ann Willmott’s great rose book, “The Genus Rosa,” came just at the right time to call attention to the shrubby roses. We were at the parting of the ways. On the one hand were the nurserymen and many garden owners who found all they wanted in the then newly raised bush hybrid teas, and on the other hand there were a few enlightened and knowledgeable gardeners who realized what had gone before and were anxious to continue with the cultivation of these plants. It was indeed the wild species that had been reaching our shores for several decades that helped the rose to stage its latest significant influence on garden design, as a flowering shrub.

It so happened that around 1900 two splendid species were introduced from the wilds of China, Rosa hugonis and R. moyesii , clear canary-yellow and brilliant tomato- or blood-red, respectively. Because the bulk of wild roses are of some shade of pink, these struck a new note; they caused gardeners to realize that among roses were to be found species every bit as valuable as all the other ornamental shrubs. It was these shrubs, noted for their flower, berry and autumn color, that in the early 20th Century created something of a landslide toward informal gardening. The rose may be said to have revealed itself as an important shrub between the wars, and still more by 1950, even though one of its most valuable species, R. rugosa , had been introduced 150 years before.

Yet another use for the rose is for ground cover. There is a large bed at the Gardens of the Rose of the Royal National Rose Society at St. Albans devoted to the prostrate and hummock-forming hybrids. We have indeed come full circle. On the one hand is the fact that the design of the Gardens of the Rose reveals very significantly the type of design favored by the Empress Josephine--the Gardenesque. On the other hand, gardeners today often favor the traditional mixed array of medieval and Elizabethan days. It is a style that has lived, buffeted by fashion but undimmed, in the walled kitchen gardens of great houses and in the humblest of cottage gardens, where plants have always been appreciated for what they are and not necessarily for the effect they create.

From “A Garden of Roses,” to be published in November by Salem House. Commentary copyright 1987 by Graham Stuart Thomas.