96 ROSE GARDENS 



destroyed by spraying mixtures, manure, straw overcoats, and 

 stems cut back to stubs. 



There were two excuses, fifty years ago, for banishing the 

 rose from the garden. For at that time there were no roses that 

 bloomed all summer; and the old-fashioned rose bushes (hybrid 

 perpetuals) were generally unsightly when out of bloom. Espe- 

 cially were these things true in America. For even to this day the 

 hybrid perpetuals give few flowers or none after June, as compared 

 with Europe. Also we have more insects and diseases to fight 

 than the Europeans. Our rose bug is worse than all their rose 

 pests put together, and even to-day we have found no cheap way 

 to control it. 



But the old excuses no longer hold good. For now we have 

 the hybrid teas, which really bloom all summer (though scantily ; 

 in August in America), and these roses make graceful bushes 

 (unless they are pruned back severely by people who are willing 

 to sacrifice garden effect in order to get the largest flowers possible 

 for vases). 



Moreover, we now have far better climbing roses, especially 

 hybrids of the many-flowered, and memorial roses, such as Dorothy 

 Perkins and Lady Gay, and therefore we can have better arches, 

 trellises, bowers, arbours, and summer houses than ever before. 

 And this is the artistic way to get height in a rose garden instead 

 of using standards, which are as ugly as they are perishable. I do 

 not blame any one for wishing to get some relief from the flatness 

 of the conventional rosery, but tree roses are a grotesque solution, 

 since they cannot hold themselves up but have to be staked. 

 Moreover, they are pitifully thin, whereas these Japanese climbers 

 supply us with the one thing that we have always needed most, 

 viz., luxuriance. 



