THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. 



furnished them. They too had their green-houses, it is said, warmed with 

 pipes filled with hot water, by^ which means they succeeded in keeping the 

 roses in bloom until the end of the year. So roses under glass, you see, 

 are by no means a modern innovation. 



Passing from these early days of the rose to the middle ages, we find 

 Chaucer, who wrote in the early part of the thirteenth century, referring 

 to the rose. In the beginning of the fifteenth century our flower is said 

 to have been cultivated for commercial purposes. Roses in those days 

 were apparently scarce and only for the rich, for small quantities of 

 them were considered of sufficient value to offset rent of house and land. 

 Would that we could pay our rent these days with a few roses. 



In 1452, as you all know, the rose became emblematic of war and blood- 

 shed, losing for the time its significance of peace. Perhaps it was the 

 thorns and not the flowers that were the real emblems of the war. It 

 was in this year that the rival factions of the white and the red roses 

 sprang up in England, the former the emblem of the house of York, while 

 the red rose stood for the house of Lancaster. You all know of the 

 furious wars which followed, and how Henry VII, in i486, reunited the 

 two houses by marrying Elizabeth, the heiress of the house of York. 



Shakespeare's appreciation of the rose was evident in his numerous 

 references to it in his works. 



It was not, however, until the early part of the nineteenth century that 

 rose culture, as we now know it, existed. From that time on the rose 

 has been preeminent. Certain wild forms were, of course, first intro- 

 duced, and these, perhaps at first by accidental crossings, resulted in 

 hybrids. Man soon took the cue thus accidentally given and began to 

 experiment for himself, crossing first the natural species at his hand, then 

 hybrids with species, and later hybrids with hybrids, and crossing again the 

 progeny thus produced with species. You can well understand that soon 

 all trace and resemblance to the original forms were lost. This crossing 

 and recrossing have caused such confusion that it is all but impossible to 

 classify garden roses. Take any book you will, look up the subject of 

 classification, and you will find no two of them agreeing, forms^ which in 

 one book are referred to one class, in another are placed in quite different 

 groups. In what follows I shall call to your attention some of the more 

 prominent types which have existed in the history of the development of 

 the rose, not designing by any means to include all of them, taking up 

 first the native or wild species, and later considering the commoner types 

 of the garden roses. 



The first of these we will consider is Rosa arvciisis, a native of Europe. 

 This is one of the parents of the Ayrshire strain and of the Dundee 

 Rambler. It is one of the most common roses of Great Britain. Be- 

 longing to the same type is the musk rose, Rosa moschata, which is 

 found wild in Northern Africa, Persia and Madeira. This is said to be 

 one of the species from which the attar of roses is obtained. It is also 



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