ROSES REMADE 

 FOR AMERICA 



J. HORACE McFARLAND 



Editor, American Rose Annual 



And the Men to Whose Skill We are Indebted 

 for the Romantic Outcrop of Home Intro- 

 ductions Which Have Reached a Climax and 

 Become Available at the Very Moment That 

 Foreign Sources of Supply are Cut Off 



John Cook of Baltimore whose 

 achievements in productions 

 for either greenhouse or garden 

 alone would have made him 

 famous. But he did both 



"Gurney" Hill, of Richmond, 

 Indiana, originator of this 

 year's lovely prize Rose Colum- 

 bia and the man who tests com- 

 mercially every Rose produced 



SRULY American Roses have not been "popular," or 



wM^$ in general use, in America until recently. The native 

 f-afcli s P ec i es - growing wild in lovely luxuriance in their 

 $W\& natural haunts, are less well known to the average 

 American than such exotics as the Chinese rugosa and Crimson 

 Rambler, the Japanese multiflora and wichuraiana. The garden 

 forms, too, have been prominently of foreign origin, as witness 

 the 1917 official list of the National Rose Society of England 

 (long the standard of reference in America), which lists but 19 

 American varieties in a total of 429, all of which, together with 

 at least 500 more French, German, English, and Irish Roses, 

 are in American commerce. We have taken our rose fashions, 

 as well as our dress fashions, from abroad. 



Not only has this been true as to the varieties of Roses for 

 American gardens; but the very plants themselves have been 

 extensively from abroad, being mainly "made in Holland," 

 from which country there were imported in the six years of 

 191 3-18 a total of 10,335,187 plants or more than 75 per cent, 

 of the total of 13,736,292 from all foreign sources. 



The much-disliked Quarantine Order No. 37 of the Federal 

 Horticultural Board put a stop to this importation of Rose 

 plants, save for an inconsiderable percentage permitted to 

 trickle through difficult 

 regulations "for trial and 

 propagation purposes." 

 America must now de- 

 pend on her own re- 

 sources for setting the 

 scenery of the annual 

 court of the Queen of 

 Flowers, held outdoors in 

 the eastern, middle and 

 north Atlantic states 

 from mid-May until mid- 

 -October, with the "grand 

 entree" in the June 

 month of Roses. 



This dependence on 

 home production of var- 

 ieties may not prove an 

 unmixed disadvantage, 

 for it ought to force us 

 to produce Roses better 

 suited to American cli- 

 matic conditions than 

 those coming from Eu- 

 rope. Our needs in this 

 direction are made mani- 

 fest constantly in the cor- 



THE CLIMBING AMERICAN BEAUTY 



Of this Rose it is said that no 

 as many seem to remain — and 



respondence of this office. Within one recent week, a letter 

 from Texas and another letter from Kansas have urged the 

 establishment in the semi-arid regions of the United States of 

 such a Rose test-garden as would determine the real value there 

 of Roses in commerce. We must not lose sight of the fact that 

 the people of the hot plains, where dry farming is of necessity 

 practised, have inherent in them exactly the same love of and 

 desire for Roses as that which characterizes those who do the 

 farming and plan the gardens in the relatively humid East and 

 in the fortunate Oregon corner of the far Northwest, where 

 the Rose seems most at home in America. 



FOR five years a sedulous endeavor has been made to dis- 

 cover and record the name, parentage, year of introduction 

 and name of introducer of every Rose of American origin, and 

 the resulting list has been published in the successive issues of 

 the American Rose Annual, issued by the American Rose 

 Society. It is believed that this list is now, thanks to the un- 

 tiring efforts of Mr. C. E. F. Gersdorff, of Washington, quite 

 complete, including as it does the Rose results of more than a 

 century in America. The 1919 list covered 428 names, a con-; 

 siderable number of which were mere "sports" of foreign var- 

 ieties, or climbing forms 

 of doubtful permanence. 

 Of this number — not 10 

 per cent, of the European 

 introductions of a single 

 century — barely 1 50 var- 

 ieties of American origin 

 have survived long 

 enough to be now in com- 

 merce, and the Roses of 

 real importance among 

 them will hardly equal 

 the " threescore and ten" 

 years of life assigned to 

 even a rose-growing man. 

 Yet the American 

 Roses that have " caught 

 on," and especially those 

 being originated and in- 

 troduced now that the 

 European Roses are hard 

 to come at, are of notable 

 value for America. In- 

 deed, some of them are 

 the admiration of our for- 

 eign friends, as 1 had wit- 

 ness a few da\s ago when 



IS ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE! 



matter how many you cut just 

 its hardiness is unquestioned 



93 



