53 



EEV1VAL OF THE OLDER ROSES. 



By Mr. Geo. Paul, F.E.H.S. 



[Read before the Horticultural Club, 1896.] 



Those who have read Mr. Jeans' s interesting and learned articles 

 in the Quarterly Review on ancient Rose growers need not fear 

 that I shall weary them by helping to trace back the varieties 

 which supplied the florists' shops of Rome in the time of the 

 Emperors, or which were grown by the florists of Paestum and 

 Palestrina to send to the Roman Covent Garden — Palestrina, a 

 Florentine suburb, the scene of one of Ouida's idyllic stories — 

 " a winter city " where (as she describes it) for- a few francs, in 

 midwinter, every corner of her heroine's rooms was filled with 

 pot Roses, and the atmosphere scented with their perfume. 



I suppose the only Rose Mr. Jeans identifies as coming down 

 to us from that ancient town is the old B. centifolia, single or 

 double, of which the old Red Burgundy Rose and the miniature 

 Burgundy are the existing representatives, which reached us, so 

 he says, and I am told that Dean Stanley in his letters confirms 

 it, by means of the Crusaders via Provence, of which, however, 

 somewhat more anon. 



My subject is rather the revival of the taste for the old- 

 fashioned garden Roses, which were put on one side by reason of 

 the florists' zeal or other causes, and have recently been rescued 

 from their hiding places and brought again into general 

 cultivation. 



I shall speak first of the Roses which grew in English gardens 

 from Gerarde's time, about 1600, to the close of the last century, 

 and secondly of the Roses which were the favourites, and the 

 products of the raisers' skill, of the first forty years of the present 

 century ; produced in the earlier years by Vilmorin, Cels, and 

 Dupont, and later on by Victor Verdier and Laffay in France, 

 and by Rivers in England, up to the days of the elder Guillot 

 and Lacharme, including also the later Roses recorded in Redoute, 

 and by Andrews and Miss Lawrence in England. 



The seventeenth-century Roses are given, several of them, in 

 Gerarde, but I have not had time to search his volumes. Aiton, 

 however, quotes him in his " Hortus Kewensis " (1789), and I 

 -find he grew so many of the Kew sorts that I feel inclined to 



