Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
ROSE BUSH RESCUE
Constantia gardener wants precious plants to have a future by sharing them with others
In a garden in Constantia, Athalie Burrows makes sure her roses are looked after, despite the drought. These are “Granny’s roses”, and have been in Burrows’ family for nearly 150 years, travelling around the country as the family moved.
Now she is anxious about what will happen to the roses in future, and wants to give some away.
In a letter to HOME, she wrote: “I celebrated my 80th birthday last year and I would hate to fall off my perch and have the property sold and the roses end up in the wheelie bin. I would love to pass on some plants to other gardeners.”
Burrows’ great-grandfather, John Brent, was an 1820 settler who was allocated a farm called Sea View, near Hamburg in the Peddie district in the Eastern Cape.
Her grandfather, John Elliot
Brent, took over the farm, and in 1873 he married Ann Peverett, also of 1820s stock. Peverett brought the roses with her as a bride and then planted them at Sea View.
Their son, Ashton Brent, became Burrows’ father, and she grew up at Sea View. In 1975, when the apartheid government created the “independent” homeland of Ciskei, the farm and many others were expropriated by the Ciskei government.
By this time Burrows was married and living in Durban. She and her siblings went back to the farm for a last visit. “My mother said, ‘Choose what you want’, so I dug up some roses and took them back to Durban.”
Later the family moved to East London, then Joburg and finally Cape Town, with Burrows taking her precious roses with her every time.
“My mother called them cabbage roses because the petals were so compact, like the leaves of a cabbage.
“They have a lovely scent. And they spread by producing suckers.”
She looks at her drought-ravaged garden and sighs. “I’ve always been a gardener and I’m very proud of my roses. I want them to have a future.”