Wine, friends and roses

Long piece...

Yesterday I attended an informal gathering of shakers and movers of the local gardening scene. The event was occasioned by the visit of Sean Hogan of Cistus Nursery in Portland, Oregon. A copious meal served in three removes kept the group circulating, meeting and greeting. Our hosts, Jim and Dan, are probably still in bed this morning: what a spread - and all of it home made! Maybe I should have volunteered to come back today and help with the clean up.

The weather was perfect, the garden was full of hellebores, and the many conversations were intense and entertaining. I ran into two fellow bloggers, Connie of Hartwood Roses

http://www.hartwoodroses.com/index.php

and Chris U of 1003 Gardens:

http://1003gardens.blogspot.com/

Chris is interested in everything; Connie and I share an enthusiasm for certain roses. I could have talked to each of them all day without getting bored.

Now to the roses.

A bit of history helps here. What follows was taken from Graham Stuart Thomas's Climbing Roses Old and New of 1965 and Helen Van Pelt Wilson's Climbing Roses of 1955. I acquired and devoured Thomas's rose trilogy near the times they were originally published. These provided the structure on which my subsequent understanding of garden roses was based. Callow youth that I was, I had a low regard for two important home-grown products: Helen Van Pelt Wilson's Climbing Roses mentioned above and Richard Thomson's Old Roses for Modern Gardens of 1959. My appreciation for these works came only after I realized that Mother Nature has a thing or two to say about which roses we can grow.

Late in the nineteenth century the Belgian botanist François Crépin described two new Asian roses using the names Rosa wichuraiana and Rosa luciae. Some modern botanists treat these as conspecific. For over a century the names were spelled as I have given them. Recently there has been a move to change the spelling of each name: wichuraiana becomes wichurana and luciae becomes lucieae in the new spellings. Or at least I think that's what is happening. And there are other spellings. Max Wichura would no doubt be surprised at the trouble his name has given gardeners.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the American nurseryman William Manda began to use the one he knew as Rosa wichuraiana for hybridizing. The results were amazing: he produced several roses of unique character, roses unlike any which had been raised before. These roses produced prodigiously long limp canes ideal for training on walls, pergolas and fences. One of Manda's roses, 'Gardenia' of 1899, is still grown and loved by many gardeners. Before I leave Manda, I should mention that I grow an ivy Hedera helix 'Manda's Crested' which might have originated in his nursery (I have not been able to confirm that yet).

Manda's success was quickly imitated by others, most notably by Dr. Van Fleet in the United States and by the firm of Messieurs Barbier et Cie in Orléans, France. Dr. Van Fleet's hybrids became well known here in the US - and deservedly so. It's time for a revival of interest in the Van Fleet hybrids. Other than the excellent and still widely sold 'New Dawn', a bud sport of 'Dr. Van Fleet', few are now widely grown.

The Barbier firm used what they knew as Rosa luciae to produce a line of these hybrids over a period of two decades, although the best known ones were produced early in the century. The Barbier hybrids have medium-sized flowers which are produced prodigiously. Some rebloom in some climates. The ones I know do not rebloom for me.

Here's what intrigues me: for all their good qualities, these Barbier roses do not seem to have caught on in America. I checked McFarland's Modern Roses (1930), and many of them are there: someone must have been growing and offering them. Mrs. Wilson mentions only 'Aviateur Blériot', a rose Thomas does not mention. I can find no reference in Wilson's book to 'Albéric Barbier', 'Albertine', 'Alexandre Girault', 'Auguste Gervais', 'François Juranville', 'Léontine Gervais' or'Paul Transon' - to cite just some of the once better known members of this group.

Could it have been a language thing? Maybe Americans didn't like being told they were misspelling names when they wrote e instead of é (or printers despaired because their fonts did not include é or ç. McFarland got the é right, but the ç seems to have eluded him). Or could it be a case of the public confusing these excellent roses with rambler roses? I suspect the latter. The early rambler roses were largely derived from Rosa multiflora. As a group, they were and are very mildew prone: some of the older varieties are full of mildew by the time they come into bloom. The first generation hybrids of Wichura's rose are free of mildew and generally black spot also. Someone was not getting the word out.

Another possibility comes to mind: then as now, people want roses which bloom continually. Even now, a century later, we have very few contenders for that distinction. And for the most part, fragrance has been a casualty in this pursuit. In June I wouldn't look twice at a Knock Out rose; but in early December, when it's likely to be the only type of rose blooming freely, I see it in a new light. Now if most of them only had fragrance...
And there is this possibility for explaining the seeming scarcity of Barbier roses in gardens back then: why grow foreign roses when excellent and somewhat similar roses were being produced in the US by Van Fleet? Most of us have outgrown that sort of chauvinism by now, but it was common back in those days. Here's a photo of Dr. Van Fleet from McFarland's Modern Roses:

Evoking summer

I’m sick of shivering and looking at snow. I’ve had enough of winter; I want summer.

But winter is not all bad; if nothing else, it forces us to face up to all the indoor stuff we’ve been neglecting. Tonight I began to look over images from 2009 to see which if any deserve to be loaded up to the web site. But soon I was wandering and found the images above. The pond scene is from June of 2004. The image foreshortens the distance between the lythrum and the Japanese irises: it’s actually about twenty feet tip to tip.

What the picture does not convey is any sense of the heat and humidity we typically experience when these irises are blooming. And the picture can be enjoyed without the bother of mosquito bites. So winter does have its advantages, doesn’t it?

While I'm at it, here's another view from early summer. This view carries the eye down under the pergola to glimpse the path at the lower end of the garden. This axis is also easily enjoyed from my favorite seat in the fireplace room.

Aeolian Woes

Last weekend I toured the garden checking for things to do before the ground freezes. The pergola caught my eye, and it occurred to me that the hurricane season had passed for this year without any wind problems. My forty foot pergola is built on the gravity principle: gravity is the only force holding it together. The strong wind yesterday revealed once again the limitations of that system. Today, all of the long runners and cross beams of the pergola are on the ground, blown down one by one in yesterday’s winds. The pergola piers themselves are still upright and wreathed in the collapsed tangle of climbing roses. This happened once before as the tail end of a hurricane passed through. I’ll be working alone as I attempt to put everything right, and past experience has shown me that it’s rough, painful work. As all real gardeners know, gardening is a blood sport. I’ve got enough to keep me busy for the next few weeks without the pergola problem, so the roses might very well spend the winter on the ground. If so, I’ll have to get them up before the buds for vegetative growth start to swell: once that happens, they will be too fragile to successfully withstand the rough work involved in pushing the canes back into position.

Noisette roses

Although I’ve known about Noisette roses for decades, the concept of “Noisette rose” has proved to be elusive. My introduction to the group came from books. My introduction to the actual plants of this group, the group in its nominal sense, came through the widely revered old cultivar ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’. Another early acquisition, since lost, was ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster’. I think I can make a good argument that neither is really a Noisette rose.
In the case of ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster’, it’s the parent of the Noisettes and thus not a Noisette itself. It preceded the hybridizing work done by the Noisettes (the people, the family who did the early work to develop this group) themselves.
In the case of ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, let’s just say she is for her time a very modern lady not about to be bound by the conventions of her class. She is, in fact, better understood as a modern, large-flowered climbing rose. She has Noisette in her ancestry – Noisette and a lot more. That those promoting her have chosen to emphasize the Noisette side of the family is perhaps understandable, but it’s also misleading.

Redouté painted one the roses raised by the Noisettes. To my eyes they look like what you might expect to get if you crossed Rosa multiflora with dwarf China roses. These original Noisette roses were quickly supplanted by better roses: better in the sense of more colorful and with larger flowers. It is said that much of the early breeding work in this group used the then widely grown tea roses, and the best Noisette roses are generally agreed to be the so-called tea Noisettes. It’s also generally agreed that these tea-Noisettes are not roses for us here in zone 7 eastern North America, although old books often contain descriptions of the lengths gardeners of those days went to grow these plants in the open. That they are cut back severely in our winters is only part of the problem; the other problem is that they are potentially huge plants, not easily protected in the winter.

The Noisettes in the accompanying image are two, although you would have to have very sharp eyes to realize that. They are ‘Alister Stella Gray’ and ‘Claire Jacquier’, and they look so much alike that I have spent a lot of time convincing myself that they really are distinct. These roses have a characteristic, light and very pleasant fragrance. It didn’t take as long as you might think for them to go to the eves of the house and then arch out gracefully over the garden.

All three of the roses mentioned here were raised in the late nineteenth century, long after the Noisettes as a group had moved from center-stage. Curiously, ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, the least typical of the group, was the earliest of the trio to make her debut (in 1879 according to G. S. Thomas).

The image shows them at peak bloom in late May. This soft yellow color is lovely in the garden. In my experience, these roses never bloom again later in the season.

Life under a pergola

When I redesigned my garden about fifteen years ago, I took the bold step of installing a pergola across the main longitudinal axis of the garden. The garden is sixty feet wide, and the pergola is forty feet long. In crossing the main axis, the pergola divides the garden into a section of approximately one third of the garden’s area and another of approximately two-thirds of the garden’s area. The smaller area is the one nearer the house and forms what I call the pool garden.

The pergola now supports large plants of several climbing roses which during rose time produce a roiling, fragrant foam of white which covers the pergola. When the atmospheric conditions are right, the garden fills with the scent of roses.

The pergola fulfils several functions. Its main purpose was to be a support for the climbing roses I wanted. Its placement gives it a major role in shaping the garden. It also serves as a path from one side of the garden to the other. Once the roses had grown up into place, something else became apparent. The area under the pergola is a garden room of its own, the most conventionally defined such space in the garden. At night, when the space under the pergola (the interior of this garden room) is softly illuminated by candlelight or even with the reflected glow of a spotlight, there is a sense of enclosure which is uniquely satisfying. This is produced by an effect comparable to that produced by a scrim in the theater: the light reflecting on the leaves of the vines which clothe the sides of the pergola produces the illusion of walls defining the space. The rest of the garden disappears, and the viewer is left with the impression of being in a comfortably big, green-walled hallway or room. It’s an enchanting effect. The sense of seclusion this produces is wonderful. It's a favorite place for reading at night, even on mild winter nights.

For more views of the pergola see: http://www.jimmckenney.com/pergola_photo_gallery.htm