2 THE ROSE BOOK 



saving him such disappointment and disillusion as are 

 preventable, send him along rejoicing in delights that 

 warm the heart of the amateur. The accomplished 

 rosarian may decry them as crude, wrapt, as he is, in 

 fond memories of daintier pleasures, to which, however, 

 he has come through knowledge of those he is apt to 

 depreciate, and, in the light of his accumulated experi- 

 ence, to forget. 



How clinging are first impressions ! How long re- 

 membered ! So 'twere shame not to let the beginner 

 win his way to the finer rose glories through those that 

 are more easily attained. To launch him at once into 

 the perplexing labyrinth of intractable Teas and Noisettes 

 and Pemetianas, and those that are notoriously " shy 

 bloomers " were surely a crime, both to the roses and 

 to himself, destructive of his peace ;of mind, disillusive 

 of his hopes and aspirations, and ruin — ^black, headlong 

 disaster — for the roses themselves. 



" Each goodly thing is hardest to begin," sang 

 Edmund Spenser ; nevertheless, let all who come to 

 worship at the shrine of Queen Rose echo the words 

 of Don Juan, and resolve that "my way is to begin 

 with the beginning." When he has grown grey in the 

 service of the roses, the reader will ever remember his 

 earliest days among them as perhaps the happiest of 

 all ; and when, if it ever happens, he comes to a full 

 knowledge of their ways and a solution of their secrets, 

 memories will still arise of those times when the rose 

 days were in front and only the cabbage days behind. 

 Even then, having an acquaintance with all the rose 



