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A Tale of Four Roses
Nov
We have an old water tank sitting on top of a 10-metre-tall iron stand. When we bought our Ascot property thirty-five years ago, Criss and I, our imagination running wild, pictured a Himalayan musk rose soaring to the top of the ironwork and cascading down, a waterfall of exquisite single white flowers scenting the air with a fragrance so delicious that Titania would sleep beneath it. Sadly, we didn’t plant Shakespeare’s musk rose, Rosa moschata, but Rosa brunonii, which whilst fragrant, isn’t intensely so.
Looking back, I chose this species because my late friend Otto Fauser had one growing high into an old silver birch in his Olinda garden when I first met him fifty years ago. The rose was planted and started to grow, a bit slower than I hoped, but grow, flower and set hips it did until a whiff of Roundup from a careless gardener polished it off. (Roses are terribly susceptible to Roundup.) However, some birds must have feasted on its small glossy red hips and, resting in a nearby pine tree, dropped some seed because a decade later, we have a 3 metre tall and 10 metre wide impenetrable, arching thicket which now, in the latter half of November, is covered by large sprays of flowers, faintly lemon as they open ageing to white. Prominent yellow stamens add to the rose’s beauty. Later in the season the sprays of hips are marvelous when picked for a vase.
Rosa brunonii
Another rose flowering in the garden now is Rosa moyesii, a species native to western China. We grow two forms. By far the best is Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’, a star of the purple border in the world-famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle. It has a short season of dazzling scarlet- orange single flowers which are followed by large orange bottle shaped rose-hips which hang on the the 3 metres tall bush until late autumn. The foliage of this rose is particularly attractive. The second form is Rosa moyesii ‘Highdownensis’ which was introduced a hundred years ago by the renowned English plantsman, Sir Frederick Stern, who gardened on the chalky soil of the Sussex Downs. This rose flowers a little later than ‘Geranium’ and its single flowers are crimson pink. Its hips are a little smaller too. If ‘Highdownensis’ has a fault it is that occasionally a branch will suddenly die for no apparent reason. In our garden it has grown nearly 3 metres high and spread 2 metres.
A Praying Mantiss on the hips of Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’
The last of the four is Rosa ‘Veilchenblau’ or ‘Violet Blue’. Raised in Germany during the early part of the last century this rose has been growing happily in the same spot in our garden for thirty years or more. Criss and I bought it after seeing a splendid specimen growing in Tim Neville Arboretum in Dorset Road, Ferntree Gully at the base of the Dandenong Ranges. We grow it on a three-metre-high, iron tripod. To give it stability the tripod is attached to a star picket hammered 80cm into the ground. The individual semi-double flowers are quite small, about the size of a fifty cent coin, but in compensation it carries thirty or more flowers to each cluster. Purple-red when they first emerge the flowers quickly age to shades of violet-blue. I only get a faint sense of the lily-of-the valley-fragrance about which English writers wax lyrical. A few years ago this rambling rose had grown so big and was so full of dead wood that I cut the whole thing down to 90cm. It responded with good grace and is now a healthy 2 metres tall and almost as much wide. When I say healthy, I should mention that the foliage of ‘Veilchenblau’ is a martyr to powdery mildew later in the summer. It doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t affect the superb show this rose puts on in its brief three weeks of late spring and early summer glory.
Rosa ‘Veilchenblau’ or ‘Violet Blue’.