128 CULTURE OF THE ROSE. 



ordinary customs of private life, would lead us to suppose, and 

 with some degree of correctness, that roses were very abundantly 

 cultivated by them all ; and we are inclined to think that their 

 cultivation was then far more general than at the present 

 time, although the art of producing them was in its infancy. 

 However surprising in other respects may have been the progress 

 of the culture of roses within forty years, particularly in France, 

 Holland, and Belgium, there can be little doubt that, although 

 the Romans were acquainted with a much smaller number of 

 varieties than the moderns, yet flowers of those vaiieties were 

 far more abundant than the aggregate quantity of flowers of all 

 the varieties of roses cultivated at the present day. It cannot 

 be positively asserted, that the Hybrid Perpetual Roses of the 

 present day were unknown at Rome, since the gardeners of that 

 city practised sowing the seeds of the Rose, by which mode 

 many of the most remarkable varieties of that class have been 

 obtained by modern cultivators. The Romans, however, prefer- 

 red to propagate by cuttings, which produced flowers much soon- 

 er than the seed-bed. 



But, though the Romans may have had roses of the same spe- 

 cies with some of those which we now cultivate, it is scarcely prob- 

 able that these species could have continued until this period, 

 and escaped the devastation attendant on the revolutions of 

 empire, or the more desolating invasions of the Huns and Goths. 

 Thus it is, that those roses of Peestum to which allusion is so 

 frequently made by ancient writers, and which, according to 

 Virgil and Pliny, bloomed semi-annually, and were common in 

 the gardens of that city, are not now to be found. Jussieu and 

 Ijaudresse, two French gentlemen, successively visited Italy, 

 with the express object of finding this twice-bearing Rose in 

 Pffistum or its environs, yet, notwithstanding their carefully 

 prosecuted researches, they could find no traces of it whatever. 



Although the number of varieties known to the Romans was 

 very limited, they had discovered a method of making the bloom- 

 ing season continue many months. According to Pliny, the 

 roses of Carthage, in Spain, came forward early and bloomed in 



