lOO 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 262. 



I have since visited the Old Indian Fort, a natural fort, 

 seven miles from this point, and other similar cliffs in this 

 locality, but have failed to find another plant of this Fern. 



Bowling Green, Ky. -S". F. Price. 



Plant Notes. 

 Hybrid Brier Roses. 



A RECENT issue of TJie Garden contains a colored 

 plate of a group of the hybrid Brier Roses shown in 

 London last year at the metropolitan exhibition of'the 

 National Rose Society by the raiser, Lord Penzance, an en- 

 thusiastic rosarian and liberal supporter of the society. 

 These hybrids are obtained by crossing the Sweet-brier 

 with various Hybrid Perpetual Roses, chiefly Alfred 

 Colomb, Dr. Sewell and Paul Neyron. The new race is 

 sweet-scented, with foliage as fragrant as that of the Sweet- 

 brier. The color of the flowers varies, however, from 

 light pink to scarlet, and in the Rosarian's Year Book, 

 Lord Penzance reports that " as many as four or five of the 

 seedling Sweet-briers which have hitherto flowered have 

 now turned out to be perpetuals, blooming a second time 

 tin the autumn and blooming then freely. During the au- 

 umn of 1 89 1, indeed, in spite of the heavy rains they 

 have gone on blooming right through the month of Octo- 

 ber, ^i^<i they bloom, like their seed parent, in clusters. An 

 additional charm, and in my estimation a great charm, is 

 to be found in the fact that these flowers have a very de- 

 licious scent — a scent quite independent and different 

 from that of the foliage." From an article by a correspond- 

 ent of The Garden which accompanies the plate of these 

 charming flowers the following account is condensed : 



Many lovers of the Rose will call to remembrance the col- 

 lection of hybrids of the Sweet-brier and other types Lord 

 Penzance sent to one of the meetings of the Royal Horticultu- 

 ral Society in June, 1891, and later to the Rose show held at 

 the Royal Aquarium. They illustrated in a remarkable de- 

 gree the possibilities of cross-breeding in Roses, in which work 

 his lordship has proved eminently successful. 



In a paper contributed to the Rosarian's Year Book for 1891, 

 Lord Penzance asks. How do these modern Hybrid Perpet- 

 uals comport themselves in the garden ? He answers his own 

 question, by saying, " We all know how hard it is to make a 

 lovely object out of a standard Rose, and whenever this is 

 done it is achieved only by a very careful and skillful use of 

 the pruning-knife. But, take the dwarfs. Do they form them- 

 selves into what used to be known as a Rose-bush ; or are 

 they not given to exhibit a straggling, unequal growth, one or 

 two shoots breaking up from the crown or the lower part of 

 the plant and robbing the life from the rest ? If cut back hard 

 in the spring the plants become a stumpy, somewhat insignifi- 

 cant and not a very captivating object. If subjected to what 

 the French call the 'taille longue,' they are apt to become 

 leggy and shabby in the lower branches. Here, again, there 

 is no doubt but that a good deal may be done by skillful 

 pruning, but the growth of the plant does not lend itself 

 readily and naturally to the formation of an even head or sym- 

 metrical bush." It must be admitted there is much truth in 

 the foregoing remarks. 



Lord Penzance is of opinion that the gift of autumn-flower- 

 ing of the Hybrid Perpetuals comes from having been crossed 

 with what he calls the Eastern Rose — the Rose de Bengale of 

 the French. The comparatively scanty bloom of many of the 

 Hybrid Perpetuals, and the contrast between the old summer 

 Roses and the modern Hybrid Perpetuals are very striking. 

 The old summer-flowering Roses are covered with bloom in 

 their season. I saw a striking instance of this in an old gar- 

 den at Enfield during the past summer. A path, arched v/ith 

 wire trellises, had been covered years ago with the old- 

 fashioned summer Roses, and at the time I saw them they 

 were in grand bloom ; indeed, in such happy plenteousness, 

 as to form a floral sight worth going miles to see, but the gar- 

 dener, knowing the fleeting character of the Rose-bloom, had 

 wisely planted, among the Roses, Clematises and other late 

 summer-flowering subjects to carry on the floral succession 

 until the autumn. Lord Penzance points out that the class of 

 Roses known as Hybrid Chinas and Hybrid Bourbons, none 

 of which ever bloom a second time in autumn, put forth a 

 sheet of bloom in every part of them during the summer 

 with a profusion which it would be difficult to name half-a- 

 dozen Hybrid Perpetuals capable of emulating. Two more 



well-known defects in the Plybrid Perpetuals are mentioned. 

 They are destitute of fragrance, and " many, if not most of 

 them, are short-lived." It was the existence of these defects 

 in our most popular class of Roses which induced Lord Pen- 

 zance to try if something better could not be produced by 

 working upon new lines. Recognizing the fact that the races 

 or families of the Rose are capable of combining by cross- 

 fertilization, his lordship entered upon a line of action of his 

 own with the object of securing a new Rose which might be 

 free from some of the existing defects. The Sweet-brier was 

 selected as the natural basis of a new race. In the hrst place, 

 it is indigenous to the soil and chmate ; it is proof against the 

 most vicious attacks of our English winters ; it is superior to 

 the weakness of mildew, and as little subject to the troubles 

 of the Rose as any other species. It is a prolific seed-bearer, 

 and " more certain to bear fruit when fertilized with pollen of 

 other Roses than any Rose or class of Roses that in my limited 

 experience has presented itself." 



Some interesting facts are noted. The seedHngs obtained 

 by impregnating the Sweet-brier with foreign pollen had a re- 

 markable strength of root and growth, and struck readily from 

 cuttings. The sweet-scented foliage of the Sweet-brier was 

 also produced. A complete cross was obtained between the 

 Sweet-brier and the Persian Yellow, the bloom larger than that 

 of the Sweet-brier, pale yellow in color, and the foliage fully as 

 fragrant, if not more so. The Austrian Copper, crossed on to 

 the Sweet-brier, produced a seedling, the bloom not quite so 

 deep in its color as that of the pollen parent, yet a close copy 

 of the original, with the sweet scent of the Brier diffused in its 

 foliage. The pollen of the Hybrid Perpetuals, the Hybrid 

 Bourbons and the Hybrid Chinas, put upon the Sweet-brier, 

 produced distinct crosses — distinct in the sense that the wood, 

 foliage, habit of growth and the thorn are not those of the 

 Sweet-brier. 



"Among hundreds of Sweet-brier seedlings," says Lord 

 Penzance, "which are evidently crosses, I have had only one 

 that did not retain the sweet foliage of the seed parent, and as 

 to this one I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake 

 as to its parentage." All attempts to cross the Sweet-brier 

 upon the Hybrid Perpetual have failed to produce scented 

 foliage, but the seedlings so obtained have been small, and 

 Lord Penzance is not by any means hopeless of attaining this 

 result. 



So far the blooms of the Sweet-brier seedlings show but little 

 tendency to doubleness. Lord Penzance states that none of 

 them as yet have given him more than two 'complete rows of 

 petals. It is his desire to secure a greater degree of double- 

 ness, and he hopes to succeed in another generation or two of 

 seedlings. With this end in view, it is his intention to cross 

 them again with the pollen of Hybrid Perpetuals, Hybrid 

 Chinas and Hybrid Bourbons. Other crosses have engaged, 

 and still are engaging, the attention of Lord Penzance, such as 

 the Moss Rose, Cellini, with the Musk Rose, Fringed Musk, 

 which he has secured ; the joint characteristics of the progeny 

 are unmistakable. Monsieur Cr^pin, the distinguished au- 

 thority on the botany of the Rose, pronounced it to be a dis- 

 tinct hybrid. 



One difficulty in the way of the cross-fertilization of Roses is 

 to procure " the pollen required at the right moment. The 

 time at which, and during which, the stigmas of the flower to 

 be operated upon are mature and fitly receptive is very uncer- 

 tain and of short duration. The same thing is true of the 

 anthers, and the liberation of pollen, and this makes an op- 

 posite combination between the stigmas of one I'ace and the 

 pollen of another no easy task." But in the course of his 

 operations Lord Penzance has discovered that the pollen of 

 the Rose can be kept in full vitality if preserved from all 

 moisture or damp for many weeks — in short, from one end to 

 the other of the hybridizing season — and in his experience the 

 preserved pollen may actually produce a larger proportion of 

 seed than the pollen fresh from the flower. Not that it is to 

 be understood that preserving pollen adds to its fertilizing 

 power, but that "it can be applied to the stigma of the seed- 

 bearer in much fuller quantity and much more handily and 

 adroitly than can be done with the fresh. When the pollen 

 bursts from the anthers in the firstinstance it very often breaks 

 forth in small quantity only, and the supply of it is at times apt 

 to fall short in the midst of an operation." Then ripe pollen 

 is not always obtainable when the fiower to be dealt with is 

 exactly fit for the work, and there is a temptation to take the 

 pollen before it is fully ripe. 



It must not be supposed all the crosses made by Lord Pen- 

 zance have succeeded. He has failed with the Boursault and 

 Microphylla types ; also with Rosa Sinica and the Macartney 

 Rose, but there is the right ring in the resolve with which his 



