ROSA HUGONIS 



A New Hardy, Yellow Rose from China 



David Fairchild 



IF YOU see a particularly beautiful 

 picture hanging in a friend's house 

 your first question is, "Who painted 

 it?", yet how few of the people 

 who visit a rose garden and admire the 

 beauties of color and form ever realize 

 that practically all of our cultivated 

 double roses are almost as much the 

 result of man's work as a picture 

 is. These living forms have arisen from 

 the greatest artificial mixing of species 

 which man has been able to bring about 

 by the process of hybridization. 



Wild roses from all over the world 

 have entered into their ancestry and 

 made them what they are, so that to a 

 rosarian the history of a rose's ancestry 

 is quite as fascinating as is a family 

 tree to a student of genealogy. 



To create a rose which will delight 

 thousands of people must be as keen and 

 wonderful a pleasure as intellectual 

 man can enjoy; long after he has crum- 

 bled to dust generations of beautiful 

 women, happy children, old men and 

 young lovers will bury their faces in 

 its petals and forget for the moment 

 all else but its beauty. 



Next to this pleasure, perhaps, is the 

 enjoyment that comes from finding a 

 wild rose in some far off land where it 

 blooms unseen by cultivated eyes, and 

 knowing that it will become the admired 

 and loved garden treasure of a whole 

 great civilized country. 



I do not know if Father Hugo Scallan 

 still lives or not, nor whether his life 

 was a happy one, but if he is alive 

 it would surely give him the keenest 

 kind of pleasure to watch the career 

 of a yellow rose which he found in 

 China. 



In 1899 he sent seeds of this rose to 

 the British Museiim, the authorities 

 there sent it to the Royal Botanic 

 Gardens at Kew — that great institution 



from which so many things of value 

 have come into cultivation; and from 

 Kew we obtained seeds for the United 

 States. Very early each spring it 

 blooms and it is yearly attracting the 

 attention and arousing the enthusiasm 

 of more and more flower-loving Amer- 

 icans. 



Rosa hugonis is the name that has 

 been given to this beautiful yellow rose 

 that deserves a place in every dooryard 

 in America. It is the earliest blooming 

 of almost all the roses and earlier than 

 any other yellow rose. It is of a lovely 

 shade of yellow, is delicately perfumed 

 and produces its single flowers in such 

 profusion, as almost to conceal the 

 plant. It is perfectly hardy, not being 

 injured by — 22° F., which cannot be 

 said of most of the other yellow roses. 



At th; Arnold Aboretum near 

 Boston Professor Sargent says it is 

 perfectly hardy and free flowering and 

 "is certainly one of the most valuable 

 single roses which has lately been intro- 

 duced into gardens." ^ 



It seems entirely fitting that to 

 Dr. W. H. Van Fleet, the originator of 

 the Silver Moon and the Van Fleet 

 roses, those masterpieces of rose hybrid- 

 ization, should be given the credit for 

 insisting, as long ago as 1907, that 

 Rosa hugonis be introduced into America 

 for the dooryards of American homes 

 and for the use of American rose 

 hybridizers. It was his insistence that 

 led the Department of Agriculture to 

 import it from Kew Gardens. 



In the photograph Rosa hugonis is 

 shown as espaliered against the wall 

 of the writer's house at North Chevy 

 Chase, Md. Every spring, before any- 

 thing but the Japanese flowering apri- 

 cots (Prunus mume) and the single 

 flowering Japanese cherries are in 

 bloom, it has delighted all who have 



•Arnold Aboretum, Harvard University Bulletin of Information, New Series, Vol. T, No. 5, p. 20. 



429 



