688 



ROSA. 



THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



ROSA. 



and to produce them in all their 

 loveliness and purity of colour, they 

 must be grown under glass. This is 

 not so. Tea Roses may be grown in 

 many gardens where they cannot now 

 be found, and all who love Roses 

 should try them. The variety of lovely 

 colours amongst Tea Roses, the odour, 

 the long season over which a profuse 

 bloom is borne, and their charming 

 foliage are great merits. Let us for 

 ever give up the stupid notion of grow- 

 ing our Roses only in a Rosery, in 

 some out-of-the-way spot. The grand 

 Tea Roses now under notice are worthy 

 of the best position in the garden. 

 None, with me, have ever been pro- 



to grow. Another is not to let the 

 littJe plants flower they try to do 

 so very early, and this must 'be pre- 

 vented by constant pinching. I feel 

 certain now that many of the kinds 

 I have lost, or that bloomed feebly and 

 died out, were the result of grafting, 

 or arose from the stock itself and con- 

 flict of the saps of plants of quite 

 different countries and natures. To 

 be quite fair to all these beautiful 

 Roses, they should be tried in both 

 ways, and not for one year only. 



A ROSE SELECTION. It is with some 

 regret that in previous editions of this 

 book I have followed the common way 

 of catalogues, of throwing Roses into 



Rose, Celeste. 



tected, but winter winds blow furiously 

 over the garden, and on several occa- 

 sions more than 20 of frost have been 

 registered among the plants. They 

 may be grown with every prospect of 

 success ovej: quite the southern half of 

 England and in many other favoured 

 spots. As it is extremely difficult to 

 buy strong plants of Tea Roses on 

 their own roots, the trials were neces- 

 sarily made with good plants grafted 

 on the Dog Rose, but all my experience 

 tends to show that with many of the 

 best kinds I should have been more 

 successful with plants raised from 

 cuttings struck in the open air in 

 autumn. A great point is to put the 

 cuttings in where we wish the plants 



many classes, often without any sound 

 reason, and thereby doing infinite 

 harm in many ways by confusing 

 people with a multitude of kinds, by 

 making too much of supposed divisions, 

 and by, in the end, keeping in cultiva- 

 tion many Roses that are not worth 

 their place in view of the many good 

 ones that want more space than is 

 now allotted them. In every branch 

 of human effort the mania for hair- 

 splitting and classification is harmful 

 and even impossible, as in the attempt 

 to distinguish between practice and 

 science ! If we glance over the pre- 

 tended divisions in catalogues of Roses 

 and look only at those around us, the 

 real distinction comes from the infusion 



