It’s the best bloomin’ year for roses ever!
They’re as big as saucers — and there’s so many of them! RACHEL BILLINGTON explains why . . .
CAN there be anything more beautiful than a rose? Yes — a bigger rose. I only mention this because something very odd has happened this year: roses seem to have doubled in size (well, nearly) and in quantity, too.
And that’s before we’ve reached the height of the season.
When I first observed this wonderful spectacle, I suspected it was the eyes of love exaggerating, as love will do, which had made me gape in wonder in my Dorset garden. But now, all my friends are saying the same thing.
This year is a phenomenal one for roses. My old English shrub rose, dark red with at least 40 petals per bloom — nameless because I inherited it in my herbaceous border 50 years ago — usually has flowers with a diameter of a tea cup.
Today, its flowers have the diameter of a large saucer.
Before I realised I was not alone in my surprise, I dreamed that the gardeners from Alice In Wonderland had magically appeared, removed my usual rose heads and attached huge substitutes.
But that wouldn’t have explained the even more than usually heady scent. Nor the extra-long and exuberant thorns, which, when picking a few for the house, led me to recall the line from the poet Anne Bronte: ‘But he that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.’
Before this glorious, albeit dangerous, rose flowered, there was already an indication of something out of the ordinary in the air. As early as April, my Banksia rose — originally a cutting from the wall of the house in Sussex where I grew up — was a mass of thick yellow.
Now, every variety of rose — whether Old English or Hybrid Tea (large-flowered), shrub, climber or rambler — is joining the party.
The only problem with the rambler is that the heads are so heavy, they have a tendency to hang down from the stems in a worrying way — making them vulnerable to this week’s surprise storms.
No such issue with the remarkable specimen beside the 13th- century St Mildred’s Church in Tenterden, Kent. A photograph in last Saturday’s Mail showed the magnificent 30ft tall, 30ft wide Rambling Rector, which has been growing there for at least 80 years and which is in flower at least two weeks early.
Those with an inquiring mind are wondering just what has happened to produce this super race. But so far, the experts’ jury is out. A MILD winter and prolonged dry periods in spring — particularly April — are the most often suggested reasons, but I haven’t found a truly convincing explanation yet, although global warming is a possibility.
All I can add is that there is the bonus that cut roses still last as well in the house, even if some purists consider that a sinful habit.
Of course, roses have always been popular in England. Although, in truth, they are the most popular flower in the whole world. We are assured that fossildating shows they existed 35 million years ago. Over the years, they have climbed into the story of human history.
In 1945, a creamy pink Hybrid Tea was named Peace to celebrate the end of World War II, and has since been voted the world’s favourite rose.
There are now, roughly speaking, 30,000 varieties and, I am forced to admit, a lot of them come from France.
Indeed, another product of France, Comte de Chambord, is most popular among my friends. I have this shrub rose myself, attracted by its vivacious pink petals, reliable habits and delicious, old-fashioned scent.
In fact, the first Hybrid Tea was developed by the French as long ago as 1867. It was called, with a justifiable lack of modesty, La France, and exists to this day. But if we must concede that other countries adore the rose, too, we still can trace our own love affair through horticulture, literature and history.
The English even went as far as to fight the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) and most people know (from lessons in Tudor history at school or if they come from the North) that the red rose was the symbol of the House of Lancaster and the white rose for the House of York — which makes the Labour Party Lancastrian, I suppose.
And there is a direct link between the great English bard Geoffrey Chaucer’s description of Cleopatra as being ‘fair as is the rose in May’ and the early part of the 20th century when the phrase ‘ an English Rose’ was first used to refer to a woman or girl with petalsoft skin and a tendency to blush on demand — an accolade given to those at the height of beauty.
Of course, English roses ought to be enjoyed where they belong — in the garden.
My local garden centre has a wide stock of David Austin English Roses, which I find almost irresistible, usually buying one each year. This year, I have ignored the pink Gertrude Jekyll, and the yellow Graham Thomas, past favourites, and plumped for the creamy-white William And Catherine (named in commemoration of the wedding of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge).
One of my earliest ambitions — along with being a tightrope walker and the first mounted policewoman — was to have a rose named after me.
I would have filled my garden with it and talked about myself with total admiration.
Since this was not to be, I compromised and called my first daughter Rose. Although being named after a rose doesn’t always bring unalloyed joy.
U.S. president’s wife Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman noted for many superior qualities, but not beauty, complained that, despite being hugely flattered at having a rose named after her, she was less impressed on reading that the rose was ‘ no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall’.
Another joke by an American came from the great humourist H. L. Mencken, who said in his Book Of Burlesques: ‘An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage concludes that it makes better soup.’
Nor am I jealous of the rose named after ballerina Darcey Bussell, which is a very lovely deep crimson Old English shrub rose. Its petals resemble a tutu.
Even without a Rachel Billington Hybrid in my garden, I can cherish this best-ever year for roses.
One of the great debates is whether a flower is viewed best at dawn, when it is still curled sleepily round the remaining pearls of dew, or whether it shines and perfumes the air best in the glories of the midday sun. OTHERS insist that blooms are most beauteous under a delicious misting of rain, or at the end of a long day when their heads droop a little and dusk brings welcome respite.
I can date my own allure for this quintessentially English of flowers to when I was ten. My favourite poem was one written by the great Victorian sentimentalist Matthew Arnold: ‘ Strew on her roses, roses / And never a spray of yew!’
In my early convent days, we celebrated the Feast of Our Lady by strewing the path from her statue with rose petals.
In those days, as a bridesmaid, I was given baskets of rose petals to throw over the bride.
It seems to me that the rose — with its tough beauty, its alluring perfume, its wicked thorns — represents good and bad in the world.
How symbolic, then, that we are now witnessing its greatest show.
During this Year Of The Roses, country-dwellers can also enjoy a ravishing display of wild blooms.
The hedges have never been fuller with pale-pink dog roses or the even more delicate pale yellow. Known in Shakespeare’s time as eglantine, these wild roses are now popular in gardens and make stunning hedges or dividers.
One fan is TV gardener Monty Don, who speaks admiringly of their hips, which he says resemble oval aniseed balls.
Fashions for wild roses, Floribundas, ground cover roses, ramblers or shrubs may come and go, but as the U.S. writer Gertrude Stein adoringly said: ‘ A rose is a rose is a rose.’ Even she, though, would surely be surprised how the English summer of 2017 is offering such as a superlative exhibition.