196 
THE FLORIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
[ Septembeb, 
rose, with its smooth surface and closely-set petals, a model of beauty in the eyes 
of some; the globular Moss rose, with its beautifully fringed calyx, deservedly 
cherished as one of the gems of the garden; the celestial tints of the group 
Alba, scarcely equalled in any other flower ; the Austrian roses, with their rich 
yellow and copper-coloured hues ; the running or climbing Ayrshires, Semper- 
virens, &c., whose graceful and rapid growth places them in the very first rank 
of climbing plants ; and last, though not least, the Hybrid Bourbon, in whose 
praise Sappho might justly have sung in her loftiest and sweetest strains. 
There is my neighbour Smith, whose spick and span new house of red-brick 
looked comfortable enough in winter, but reminded one of a half-cooked steak 
when seen in the glare of a July sun. Three years ago he surrounded it with 
that gem of a climbing summer rose Felicite perpetue, and now the whole is 
covered with beautiful green leaves, relieved by thousands of snowy blossoms. 
These are all summer roses, and can the true lover of flowers fail to recognize 
them, or afford to pass them by with a cold look ? 
If we pass to the second quality advanced—the effect of the plant or tree in 
the garden—the Summer Roses surely are pre-eminent. Look at that Charles 
Lawson, with a head twenty feet in circumference and four feet in depth, liter¬ 
ally covered with its cup-shaped crimson flowers ! Bathed in dew, how they 
glisten in the distance under the slanting rays of the morning sun! Beside it is 
Madame Plantier of equal size and beauty. Are there any autumnal roses 
which for garden decoration can be compared with these ? I remember the late 
Sir Joseph Paxton, whose appreciation of the beautiful in gardening was both 
true and universal, standing in ecstacies before a Madame Plantier rose in my 
nurseries at "Waltham, the branches drooping with the weight of its thousands of 
snow-white blossoms, and exclaiming, u If I live, I will have beds of this rose at 
the Crystal Palace !” 
It is June, glorious June, full summer-tide, but the gayest flowers of the 
garden—the bedding-plants, the Hollyhocks, the Dahlias, are not yet in blossom. 
Are roses less valuable now than then, when these latter are in abundance ? 
And it is but right to remember that the autumnals for the most part come later, 
and never produce at one and the same time such gorgeous masses of flowers. It 
is evening, the sun is sinking in the west, I am looking on a plantation of summer 
roses, and what a dazzling mass of beauty is waiting to receive his parting 
beams! If we give the reins to fancy, we might say yon purple, crimson, and 
golden clouds lying along the horizon have caught the reflection of their varied 
hues. But while around us the cattle are lowing, the birds singing, insects 
humming, we pause, satisfied with saying we cannot give up our summer roses. 
On the third point—the durability of the season of flowering—the autumnals 
clearly have the advantage. And right glad am I that it is so. I do not wish 
to depreciate them. If their flowers are not given forth with that exuberance 
which marks the nature of the Summer Roses, they are individually of unsur- 
