Rosa moschata "Graham Stewart Thomas"

Rosa moschata "Graham Stewart Thomas" 

Rosa moschata “Graham Stewart Thomas”: note the formatting of the name. This is not a formally named cultivar, thus the use of double quotes rather than single quotes. 

This, the least prepossessing rose in the garden, has the most impressive provenance of any rose I have ever grown. 

Canon Henry Nicholson Ellacombe (1822-1916) Rector of Bitton,  Gloucestershire, late nineteenth-century author of garden books and mentor of Edward Augustus Bowles,   grew this rose at his home Bitton in Gloucestershire. Bowles acquired a piece of it from Ellacombe and grew it at Myddelton House. Graham Stewart Thomas found the Myddelton House plant in its senescence and rescued a piece. The plant I have in my garden now over a century later is a piece of the plant Graham Stewart Thomas distributed, the plant grown by Bowles and Ellacombe before him.

They don’t come any better connected than that!

Here’s another Bowles connection: here you see a flower of this rose on a page from the Elizabethan, 1597,  edition of Gerard’s Herball. This volume was once owned by Bowles, as is shown by marginalia in his hand seen elsewhere in the book. 

Rosa moschata on woodcut in Gerard, The Herball, 1597

For more about Ellacombe, see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Nicholson_Ellacombe

For more about Bowles, see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Augustus_Bowles

For more about Thomas, see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Stuart_Thomas
For more about this rose, see the Help Me Find entry here http://www.helpmefind.com/rose/l.php?l=2.16943