The Rose Garden 293 



quite unsuited to our climate. The present ideal is to girdle the 

 year with roses as nearly as may be, to cut them every day from 

 frost to frost, from vines on trellises, porches, pergolas, arches, 

 fences, walls and trees; from banks and rocks cascaded with 

 them, from hedges of rugosa and sweetbrier, from shrubbery 

 roses naturalised along paths and drives, from the wild garden 

 or the formal one, from any nook or corner that one may adorn 

 with a rose. 



Before the May tulips have extinguished their flames, the 

 hardy, clean-leaved vermin-proof rugosas open and fill the air 

 with the true rose odour. No taint of the steamy hothouse, reek- 

 ing with tobacco fumes, such as the florist's winter roses have had, 

 pollutes the pure, perfect perfume of these open-air flowers. There 

 are single white rugosas and half-double ones which, like lovely 

 Blanc Double de Coubert, bloom lavishly in May, intermittently 

 through the summer and autumn, and in winter enliven the garden 

 with their great red hips, which are almost as decorative as flowers. 

 There are light-pink rugosas, too, and admit it I must 

 deep-dyed, villainous magenta ones, that swear at almost every 

 colour in the garden, but at none so violently as at their own seed 

 vessels, for Nature, at least this once, surely has lost her colour 

 sense. No apologist can reconcile reddish purple flowers and 

 orange-red hips on the same bush. Even close by the sea, rugosas 

 will thrive. For informal, undipped hedges they resent severe 

 pruning, and only the oldest, bark-bound canes should be removed 

 for naturalising on banks, and along drives, where hybrids 

 of the half-upright R. setigera make a most lovely effect in July, 

 for longish plantations in the foreground of boundary belts of trees 

 and shrubbery about a place, and for filling in considerable areas 

 inexpensively, there are no roses to equal rugosas; but they make 



