ioo GARDENS PAST AND PRESENT 



gardens. The damask, which was the prime 

 favourite of the time and it may here be worthy 

 of remark that the roses of Passtum, probably 

 introduced into Italy from Egypt, were of the 

 damask breed, and may have come into England 

 with the Romans the Hungarian and Franckford 

 roses, the velvet and a double yellow this last 

 " very tender about London " are all mentioned, 

 together with a few single forms, some of them 

 still known by the old names, such as the apple 

 and cinnamon roses, the rose without a thorn, 

 the climbing evergreen rose, and sweetbrier The 

 finest, probably, of them all was the Provence or 

 great Holland rose (R. centifolia), not to be con- 

 founded with that other rose of Provins, which 

 we may see over and over again portrayed by Van 

 Huysum and other famous Dutch painters. We 

 call it now the cabbage rose, an unaccountable 

 name for the sweetest rose that has ever breathed 

 upon our English gardens; and it still lingers 

 with us, though the Holland form, judging by 

 the pictures, must have been a larger and fuller 

 flower. By reason of its delicious fragrance and 

 the irregular form of its full-petalled flowers, which 

 have a charm of their own quite other than the 

 shapely modern rose, no garden should be without 

 a bush or two of this fine species, which, in its 

 ancient form, has survived the inroads of the 

 hybridist for so many cycles of years. 



Noting the pride with which the " great vari- 

 etie " of roses to be found in that particular " gar- 

 den of pleasant flowers " during the early part 

 of the seventeenth century is dwelt upon in the 



