ROSES REMADE 
FOR AMERICA 
j. Horace McFarland 
Editor, American Rose Annual 
And the Men to Whose Skill We are I ndebted 
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 
PpT^RULY American Roses have not been “popular,” or 
W&Mmk in general use, in America until recently. 1 he native 
p||||g species, growing wild in lovely luxuriance in their 
natural haunts, are less well known to the average 
American than such exotics as the Chinese rugosa and Crimson 
Rambler, the J apanese 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 
1913-18 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- 
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. 
F OR 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 
theadmiration of our for- 
eign friends, as 1 had wit- 
ness a few days ago when 
THE CLIMBING AMERICAN BEAUTY IS ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE' 
Of this Rose it is said that no matter how many you cut just 
as many seem to remain — and its hardiness is unquestioned 
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