THE ROSE GARDEN. 19 



them to the writings of the ancients, with which they were familiar. But we 

 must quit the land of poetry. 



Lobel, who had a garden at Hackney, and who was appointed Royal Botanist 

 by James the First, published, towards the close of the sixteenth century, a work, 

 entitled " Plantarum seu stirpium Icones." In this work he describes ten 

 species. 



" In 1622, Sir Henry Wotton sent from Venice, to the Earl of Holderness, a double 

 yellow Rose of no ordinary nature, which was expected to flower every month 

 from May till almost Christmas, unless change of climate should change its pro- 

 perties." — Johnson's History of Gardening. This most probably was the old 

 double yellow Rose, so notorious for refusing to unfold its blossoms in our less 

 propitious climate. With regard to its flowering from. May till Christmas! — this 

 no doubt was an embellishment, to which an enthusiastic collector may be readily 

 excused for giving ear. 



Parkinson, an early English writer on Gardening and Botany, in his " Para- 

 disus," published in 1629, speaks of the " white, the red, and the damask," as the 

 most ancient in England. He enumerates twenty-four varieties ; and speaks of 

 others, but does not specify their names. He treats, in a separate chapter, of the 

 propagation of Roses by budding and by seed. The red Rose of which he here 

 speaks was no doubt the Cabbage, or Damask ; and the white one, an old variety 

 of Rosa Alba. In how many old English gardens do we find trees of the apple- 

 bearing Rose still occupying a conspicuous position, and whose ancient appear- 

 ance denotes them to have withstood the changes of many a by-gone year. 

 Sometimes, indeed, the scathing hand of time has severely marked them, and 

 they are hastening to decay.* 



There is now before me a work published on Gardening in 1654, entitled " The 

 Countryman's Recreation, or the Art of Planting, Graffing, and Gardening, in 

 three Books." In a work with such a title we might expect to find a variety of 

 flowers treated of. But no: fruit-trees seem then to have been the chief ornament 

 of country gardens : the utile was preferred to the clulce : in truth, the atten- 

 tion of our forefathers seems to have been chiefly directed towards the " making 

 of good cyder," and the " keeping of plummes" ! In the above-mentioned work 

 there is but one flower named, and that is the Rose ! Here is the article as it 

 appears in the original : 



" To Groffe a Rose on the Holly. 



" For to graffe the Rose, that his leaves shall keep all the year green, some do take and 

 cleave the holly, and do graffe in a red or white Rose-bud ; and then put clay and mosse to him, 

 and let him grow. And some put the Rose-hud into a slit of the bark, and so put clay and mosse, 

 and bind him featly therein, and let him grow, and he shall carry his leaf all the year." 



This is a recipe for obtaining evergreen Roses ! Satis siq>erque. Must we 



* I recollect meeting with two or three of this description in the gardens of Bruce Castle, 

 Tottenham, in the summer of last year .- they were of a prodigious height and size, resembling 

 apple-trees more than Roses. 



