CLIMBING AYRSHIRE ROSES 41 



dants from two wild species, namely R. multiflora and R. 

 Wichuraiana, both natives of China and Japan, the former 

 a true climber, the latter a trailer, with stems many feet 

 long and shining evergreen leaves. Crimson Rambler, a 

 variety of R. multiflora^ set the fashion when it was intro- 

 duced from Japan in 1893. It revealed the rose in a new 

 character, or, at any rate, one which had not attracted 

 much attention before, and the breeder set to work to raise 

 more of the same type. They are with us now by the 

 dozen, one might almost say hundred. Thanks to these 

 loose-growing, free-flowering, easily-cultivated Rambler 

 Roses, our gardens are now really rich in rose effects 

 produced with the aid of the pergola, arch, pillar, and 

 wall. If only R. gigantea could be induced to breed with 

 some of them, but that may come. 



Climbing decorative Roses are now a feature at flower 

 shows ; indeed, they enable Rose experts to make far more 

 effective displays than were possible when specimen roses 

 were ugly, formal things, quite unlike anything in nature, 

 or yet in art worthy of the name. It is so much easier, too, 

 to grow roses on natural lines, and the climbing trailing 

 sorts are just what was needed to wean men from a liking 

 for the severely-pruned, painfully-staked rose bush. 



Mr. Pemberton says the Hybrid China Roses (gallica 

 X indica), a production of the early part of the nineteenth 

 century, were the pioneers of autumn flowering Roses : 

 " What a sensation the advent of these, for the most part 

 strong-growing, free-flowering pillar Roses, must have 

 created. Nothing like them had been seen before. . . . 

 Some few are with us still, and may they long continue. 

 Amongst these is Blairii No. 2, raised by Mr. Blair in 

 1845, a most rampant grower, throwing out shoots ten or 



