Ancient Lineage : New Interest in Old Roses Takes Root

John Hook, a 38-year-old roofer living in suburban Seattle, doesn’t like most of the roses he sees for sale.

“The modern rose colors I find pretty revolting,” he says. “And they’re grown only for their flowers, rather than as a shrub.”

When he and his wife, Becky, drove past The Old Rose Garden, a nursery in Bothell, Wash., they were intrigued by the name and decided to stop. After some guidance from Mike Darlow, the proprietor, the couple selected two rose shrubs with the mellifluous names of “Mme. Plantier” and “Moonlight” and took them home to their garden.

Hook, a native of Buckinghamshire, England, liked the pale-cream colors of the old roses and their fragrance, which reminded him of the garden of his mother and grandmother, and he admired the way the shrubs filled out, becoming strong, tall and requiring almost no care.

Interest Increases

In fact, he preferred the old varieties so much that now, almost four years later, he has about 150 of them. “One thing sort of led to another,” he confesses, “and my interest increased a lot.”

He is one of an expanding band of U.S. gardeners who have entered the ranks of what in some horticulture circles are known as the old rose nuts. For reasons not well understood, roses historically have inspired a form of mania.

For example, Roy E. Shepherd, the rose historian, describes how during China’s Han dynasties in the last two centuries BC “gardens devoted exclusively to ornamentals (roses) are said to have become so numerous and vast that they were a serious threat to food production. To appease the people, the government was compelled to destroy many of these parks and to order the curtailment of others.”

Empress Hires Englishman

And during the height of the wars between England and Napoleonic France, Empress Josephine hired an English nurseryman to help her assemble her extraordinary collection of roses at Malmaison. Not only was he given free passage between the two countries, but in 1810 the British and French admiralties made arrangements for the safe transit of a shipment of tea-scented China Roses to her garden.

Old rose enthusiasts grow varieties that were cultivated in Europe before 1789, the year the first China Rose was imported to England and its delicate, frail and ever-blooming characteristics were fused with the tough, once-a-year flowering varieties that had survived from Greek and Roman times. A looser definition of old rose is any rose that was in cultivation before about 1867, when the French produced the first hybrid tea and, in the eyes of the old rosers, triggered a 100-year decline, exchanging shrubs with iron constitutions for “finished florists’ flowers.”

The shock troops of today’s old-rose movement are about 2,000 members worldwide of a loosely structured fellowship called The Heritage Roses Group, which holds no formal meetings and has no officers or bylaws but keeps everyone wired through a quarterly newsletter, as well as six regional and various local newsletters.

Members exchange growing tips; ask for and offer cuttings and budwood, which can be sent through the mail and grown in a new locale, and sponsor activities ranging from old rose festivals to prowling, en masse, through cemeteries or older residential areas in search of cuttings of rare, often endangered plants.

Their activities are highly focused.

A Celebration of Old Roses in El Cerrito, Calif., May 22, for example, will have roses for sale to the public and displays of blooms. But products will include rose tea, soup, cookies, syrup, perfume, prints, books, fabrics and albums.

A four-day International Heritage Roses Conference that ended May 1 at the Huntington Museum in San Marino drew old rose enthusiasts, as well as hybridizers and professionals, from Australia, New Zealand, England, France, Sweden and Bermuda to discuss everything from edible flowers to the use of old roses in historical restoration. The museum’s first Symposium on Old Roses 15 years ago drew about 35 participants. The latest gathering attracted about 200.

Many rose varieties, developed in the heyday of European rose breeding during the 1840s and 1850s, have disappeared, victims of changing tastes of affluent rose buyers, the shade of overarching trees and bulldozers.

Some Survive Neglect

But other varieties hang on, many of them in poor or ethnic neighborhoods or around abandoned homesteads and mining towns, some despite a century or more of neglect, waiting to be saved and reintroduced into gardens, parks and urban landscapes.

Virginia Hopper has spent 20 years attempting to collect and grow a cutting of every type of old rose in Mendocino County, Calif. “I’ve done a pretty good job, but I’m always finding one,” she says. “My husband cringes when we drive into town because I’m probably going to say ‘Uh-oh, there’s another one,’ and he’s had to become a good getaway driver. But most people are nice about letting me have cuttings, and I always ask if someone is around.”

When Caltrans built a vista on Pacific Coast Highway four years ago, she said, workers covered an area with 6 feet of landfill, considering the unique, sprawling rose they buried to be a weed. “I managed to get a slip of the rose, and it’s now in our collection. I literally rescued it from oblivion.”

She and her sister, Joyce Demits, five years ago had saved and reproduced enough plants that they opened Heritage Rose Gardens in Ft. Bragg and this year sold 3,000 old roses nationwide through their mail order business.

While as recently as the 1970s there was only one sales outlet for old roses in the United States, the pioneering Roses of Yesterday and Today in Watsonville, Calif., there are now about 20. And in some parts of the country, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and San Antonio the older varieties are apt to be for sale at the retail nursery down the street.

Offers 25 Varieties

“Old garden roses are the only rose we stock, and we’ve got about 25 varieties,” said Richard Green, wholesale buyer for the Native Design Nursery of San Antonio.

“The hybrid tea (or modern) roses are a maintenance headache in this climate. They get black spot, mildew and they’re an ugly shrub that doesn’t live long,” said Greg Grant, Bexar County horticulturist with the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. For a year he has been championing the use of old roses in gardens and public areas in San Antonio, where they bloom cheerfully in 100-degree-plus weather, require little or no water and resist both pests and funguses.

Using the theory that only the strong survive, he has initiated a contest to discover the oldest repeat-blooming garden rose in the area. Sponsors offered a reward of $500 and the search has been taken up on local radio. After checking more than 100 entries so far, he said the winner appears to be a shrub originally from China called “Old Blush” that will be 100 this year.

In Texas, taking cuttings of plants from cemeteries and people’s yards for re-rooting is known as rose rustling. And when a group of 30 or 40 old rose buffs gather, armed with shears and ice chests to carry the 4-inch shoots or slices of rose wood for grafting, the event, as described by Pamela Puryear of Navasota, Tex., is “the horticultural version of Sherman’s march to the sea.”

While industry surveys and sales figures indicate the general public still prefers the bright colors and abundant blooms of the modern hybrid teas and floribundas, specialized nurseries from Texas to Canada report a sales increase in old roses this year of 18% to 20%.

Threatened by Economy

“There clearly is an interest in the old garden roses,” said G. Michael Shoup Jr., proprietor of the Antique Rose Emporium in Independence, Tex., outside of Houston, where a shaky economy almost did his 5-year-old nursery in. “But the old roses created a niche, and that essentially saved us. Now I’m looking at an exponential type of sales curve.

“I worry sometimes that this is a fad, but I don’t think so, because of their permanence and the way they contribute to the landscape. . . . Anyone interested in gardening is going to discover their hardiness, fragrance, and their nostalgia. Some of these roses have been handed down in families for generations.”

Shoup got much of his original stock from the Texas rose rustlers. “I put cuttings in a mist house until they form their own roots in three or four weeks,” he said. “Then I move them out into the field and grow them in larger containers and gradually take more cuttings from them. So from one or two cuttings I can grow 1,000 plants in only an 18-month period.”

Not only are old roses easy to clone by various methods, but from a biological standpoint the new plant is a living antique; the tissue is identical with its ancestors. “This means you’re admiring a plant that Princess Josephine might have admired at Malmaison,” said Shoup.

The romantic names given to many old roses--”Red Rose of Lancaster,” “Beauty of Glazenwood, “ “Gloire de Dijon”--stir the emotions. The nostalgic appeal is particularly strong in the South, where the aroma of a 19th-Century hybrid perpetual like “General Jacqueminot” or “General Jack” is as highly prized as heirloom silverware.

Share Sense of Mission

This appreciation of the unusual charm and hardiness of the surviving varieties gives the old rose gardeners an intensity, closeness and sense of mission that perhaps hasn’t been seen in this country since the sports car pioneers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, who blinked their headlights as they passed and suffered humiliations at gas stations. (“When’s your car going to grow up?”)

Because of their dedication and expertise, sports car buffs had an enormous impact on the design of Detroit’s automobiles in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There are signs that the old rose enthusiasts are having a parallel impact on horticulture and landscaping.

Where the trend goes, the dollars will probably follow, and, in the case of gardening, the amount of money is not insignificant. The National Gardening Bureau estimates that U.S. homeowners spent $17.49 billion on their gardens in 1987. And a survey for the rose industry by the Gallup Organization found that one of four houses, or 23 million homes, last year had at least one rose bush.

The old rose enthusiasts, who for years existed in obscurity, have suddenly found themselves on the right side of many life style changes: less time for garden maintenance, informality, nostalgia for history, distrust of chemicals and environmental preservation.

Barbara Worl, an old-rose expert in Palo Alto who has lectured for many years at garden clubs and rose symposiums, believes the average American gardener is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, much as American cooks deepened their skills and interests during the 1960s. “American gardeners have always been enthusiastic but terribly naive,” she said. Now, there is a genuine interest in the English style of more informal or cottage gardening, which “has a sentimental, old-fashioned appeal.”

This trend toward informal landscaping that features perennial or long-lived plants and old roses has made a virtual hero in U.S. gardening circles of Graham Stuart Thomas, a 79-year-old English garden writer and illustrator, who may have done more than anyone to rescue endangered roses and champion their cause.

Wayside Gardens, one of the nation’s premier mail order nurseries, featured Thomas and his illustrations prominently in its latest catalogue and is expanding its selection of old garden roses. “He’s the greatest living gardener today,” said John Elsley, production manager for Wayside.

White Flower Farm, another high-quality mail order nursery, is offering roses, mostly older varieties, in its current catalogue for the first time in 15 years. The company’s reasoning tells a lot about why old roses are making a comeback:

“We dropped roses from our catalogue because we had the feeling that people who are breeding roses in this country are enormously short-sighted,” said Eliot Wadsworth II, proprietor of White Flower Farm. “The quality was being lost, and they feel they have to promote new introductions every year, like a Miss America title. Some years they develop good plants and some years they don’t, but the hoopla doesn’t vary.”

The development of the modern rose was basically a melding of eight wild species.

Some species roses were native to England, Europe and the Middle East, and their hybrids were hardy and had strong perfumes but almost without exception bloomed only once a year and had a limited range of color.

Native to Asia

The others were native to Asia, had ever-blooming characteristics, a wider color palette and exquisite flower form, after being refined by the Chinese over perhaps 5,000 years.

Ships brought the Asian plants to Europe at the end of the 18th Century and the two bloodlines were crossed, most successfully over the next 50 years in France, which had both brilliant hybridizers and a climate that favored growing rose seedlings.

As many as 5,000 new rose varieties were created over the next century and Europeans carried them wherever they colonized. Pioneers brought them with them on covered wagons across the United States and the nursery trade in roses flourished in the United States during the 19th Century.

“Some of the (plant) material was available here in Southern California within a year or two of its introduction in France in the 1860s and ‘70s,” said Clair G. Martin III, curator of the rose garden at the Huntington Museum, which has 1,500 cultivars on three acres. “A nursery outside of Sacramento as early as 1854 had something like 25,000 rose plants for sale.”

But, from the point of view of today’s old rose enthusiasts, some harmful trends developed.

In exchange for more vivid colors and ever-blooming qualities, the hybridizers had to make trade-offs. Fragrance and hardiness were both sacrificed.

Criticizes Hybrid Tea

“I have nothing good to say about the hybrid tea,” said Darlow of The Old Rose Garden. “It means having a little rose factory in the back yard where everything is perfectly sprayed and pruned, and you get the perfect flower.”

As one variety succeeded another to meet a demand for novelty by increasingly more affluent customers, the hybridizers and nurserymen apparently lost track of what they were doing. Breeding records were poorly kept, new varieties haphazardly sold and older varieties fell out of commercial trade but survived in back yards or next to graves, known only as “Grandmother’s Rose,” ending up in rose books as “origin, date and parentage unknown.”

These are the “mystery roses” or “orphans” and some old roses that were thought to be correctly identified are being increasingly questioned and placed in the orphan category.

“Positive identification for most roses is virtually impossible,” said Charles A. Walker Jr., president of the Heritage Rose Foundation, a nonprofit organization with about 400 members based in Raleigh, N.C. “There is nobody living today who has first-hand knowledge of the variety when it was introduced.”

The foundation is seeking to establish test gardens, where varieties from around the world can be grown side by side to sort out the confusion, as well as to serve as gene banks for the future. The Bermuda Rose Society began the first garden last October.

Old-rose enthusiasts also hope that the gene banks will encourage hybridizers to create more “new” old roses, by crossing modern roses back into older bloodlines or with wild species that have not been used yet, a trend that has already begun in England.

“There’s a lot more potential in Genus Rosa than has been represented up to this point,” said Dr. William Welch, a horticulturist and old-rose expert at Texas A&M.;