Teas and Chinas at the Huntington
This is the second spring for the remodeled rose garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, and the flowering is so profuse that one cannot tell the old from the new. Indeed, Ann Christoph, who did the plans, has handled the space so deftly that the inherent aberrations add to the charm.
“All are at different angles,” she commented, talking about the rose garden itself and the surrounding Shakespeare Garden, the former residence of Henry E. Huntington that now serves as art gallery, the rose arbor and the patio restaurant that was Huntington’s pool and billiard room. The problem started when Huntington planted the rose garden before he built his home, then changed the house plans to preserve two stately oak trees, skewing the intended alignments. “My problem was to preserve the gracious and semiformal design without making it look like an obvious mistake,” Christoph added.
The rose garden was planted in January of 1908, featuring large blocks of color, with no more than 200 varieties, most of them common and popular, according to Clair Martin III, curator of roses. Now there are more than 1,700 different types, including one of the world’s greatest collections of the Tea and China roses that reached Europe from China at the beginning of the 19th Century, the first roses that flower repeatedly.
The Huntington has a special Mother Lode collection of Teas and Chinas. “I go periodically to the old cemeteries in the Gold Rush country of California to get cuttings,” Martin said, smiling at the thought of himself, a tall and conspicuous horticulturist, armed with pruning shears, working his way past old gravestones. In this way, he harvests some of the 2,000 China and Tea cultivars that were transported around the Horn from England and the East Coast to California from 1850 to 1900.
Near the China and Tea roses are the old garden roses--Martin calls them “O.G.R.’s.” Some date to the beginnings of history. But they bloom just once a year. Crossing the “O.G.R.’s” with the Chinas and the Teas created the modern roses that bloom in California from April until Christmas.
“Gardens like this, and Exposition Park and Descanso have great value besides being beautiful and quiet places,” Martin commented. “Visitors can see how the different roses grow, actually in the ground, and under different conditions, before they buy them.”
The Huntington Gardens are engaged in the future of roses as one of 30 test centers for the annual selection of All America Roses and with a display of all the recent All America selections. The affection for the past, however, is evident in Martin’s special pride with a huge new bed planted to honor the genius of David Austin, an English hybridizer who has developed 60 different cultivars with the fragrance, soft colors and shapes of the roses of old, all with names drawn from English literature and history. “He loves Shakespeare and Chaucer, which ties in nicely with our library,” Martin said, leaning over to sniff a creamy pink named Lordly Oberone, and another called Chaucer. “Unbelievable,” he said. And they were.
