156 DESCRIPTION OF THE ROSE. 



The QUEEN OF THE PRAIBIES is among those best 

 known and most desirable. Individually, its flowers are 

 as void of beauty as a rose can be. Sometimes they are 

 precisely like a small cabbage, not the rose so called, but 

 the vegetable, and they are as deficient in fragrance as 

 in elegance. Yet we regard this rose as a most valuable 

 possession. It will cover a wall, a pillar, a bank, or a dead 

 trunk, with a profusion of bloom, gorgeous as a feature of 

 the garden landscape, though unworthy to be gathered or 

 critically examined. It is perfectly hardy, and of the 

 easiest culture. Those who can make no other rose grow 

 rarely fail with this. The BALTIMORE BELLE is a notable 

 exception to every thing we have said in disparagement of 

 the Prairie roses. It is evidently a hybrid of some tender, 

 ever-blooming variety, apparently one of the Noisettes; 

 and derives, from its paternal parent, qualities of delicacy 

 and beauty which are not conspicuous in the maternal 

 stock. At the same time, it has lost some of the robust 

 and hardy character of the unmixed Prairie. In a severe 

 New-England winter, its younger shoots are often killed 

 back. It shows a tendency to bloom in the autumn ; and 

 a trifle more of the Noisette blood infused into it would, 

 no doubt, make it a true autumnal rose. Some florists 

 use it for spring forcing in the greenhouse ; for which the 



