OLD-FASHIONED ROSES 47 



varieties De Meaux and Spong are the best. These 

 little Roses have been favourites with children for 

 generations. They are earlier than most other Roses, 

 but they are soon over. The rosy lilac flowers of 

 Spong's Rose are good in the foremost row of, or for an 

 edging to a bed of Roses. 



The Double Telloiu Rose 



The Double Yellow Rose is reputed to have been 

 introduced from Constantinople by Nicholas Lete, a 

 London merchant, at about the end of the sixteenth 

 century, that is at about the same time as the introduction 

 of the Provence Rose. All the plants which he brought 

 to England, however, died, and it was left to another 

 London merchant, a few years later, to reintroduce the 

 Rose, this time with success. The plant grows 

 luxuriantly in almost any rich soil, but only rarely can 

 its blooms be made to reach perfection. The buds 

 often appear freely enough, but they have a habit of 

 falling before the flower is fully developed. For this 

 reason it is almost gone out of cultivation, and is now 

 very rare indeed. The single-flowered parent of this 

 Rose is a native of a dry warm climate, and it is 

 interesting to read in Hanbury's "Complete Body of 

 Planting and Gardening," published in 1770, that "in 

 the parching and dry summer of 1762 all my double 

 yellow roses, both in the nursery lines and elsewhere, 

 in the hottest and most southern exposures and dry 

 banks, everywhere all over my whole plantations, 

 flowered free and fair. Scarcely one among them could 

 be found with a shrivelled leaf; nor did I see any that 

 had the appearance of the grub taking their sides ; but 

 all in general blew as fair, as double, and every whit as 

 complete, as the cabbage Provence rose. I never 

 observed the blow to be so generally fine before, and it 



