ANENT HYBRID POLYANTHAS 
Remember, no less than six of a kind sold, for if your garden does not have room 
for that many you should not plant them. Consider them more or less as you would a 
border of geraniums with the added factor of permanence and prestige. 
There has been a very decided lack in the sale of these wonderful things. I regretted 
it very much, at the same time not giving the matter much thought. After seeing a bed 
of annuals that were about through and looking like something the cats brought in, and 
realizing that they would have to be torn out and replaced with something else, I started 
to study the matter, and look back through the orders, and I found this out: Wherever 
a-person bought six or more of a kind they were enthusiastic and bought more. Others 
remarked about the beauty of their garden. Then I noticed that where one or two of a 
kind, sometimes one of everything I had, there were never repeat sales—in fact, some- 
times they were sarcastic. 
The proof of this is that there is no more use for a person to buy one plant of a H. 
Poly—notice I do not use the ballyhoo word Floribunda, which the American Rose 
Society refused to recognize, as it had been used about one hundred years for a specie 
rose—than there would be to say, “Well, give me a glass of Lake Superior water; | 
want to see what the lake looks like.” 
There is no use to try to kid ourselves. Sales records prove that we are not able to 
judge the effects of mass by the individual. In fact, even the most marvelous red mass 
effect ever produced—oh, yes, Nigger Boy is its name. 
To get back to where I was, a lot of people beught one ‘‘to see what it was like,”’ 
and, believe it or not, some of them even came right out and compared it with large 
flowered roses, forgetting that they were not grown for individual blooms, but for mass 
and continuity—in other words, color—in ploce of the annuals that they had grown 
before. So for that reason, if you cannot use six of a kind, do not buy any, for that is 
the way I intend to sell them from now on, NOT LESS THAN SIX OF A KIND, for 
that will protect the buyer as well as my reputation. 
NIGGER BOY 
For years an intensive search has been carried on for the perfect polyantha, designed 
to be used as a border rose or a rose for massing; a cluster flowered, extremely heavy 
blooming rose, preferably of compact growth, with completely healthy foliage. A plant 
so foolproof it could be planted in beds or masses to bloom continually, with an absolute 
minimum of spraying, shearing, or grooming. 
Hybridizers all over the world, especially Kordes in Germany, and Poulsen in Den- 
mark, searched and worked continually for the perfect polyantha. A great flood, many 
of them patented, have come on the market recently, ranging all the way from terrible to 
good. Large blooms were particularly striven for. Kordes always announced that his 
latest creation had at least 4-inch blooms, which always turned out to be 2-inch blooms 
when grown in this country. 
While the flood of new polyanthas has been deluging the rose buying world the 
perfect polyantha was quietly produced in Australia in 1931 and released in 1933— 
Nigger Boy. This remarkable rose is NOT a polyantha in lineage, but a H. T. It is a 
freak mutation in hybrid Teas with every desirable polyantha quality. It came forth 
unheralded, as did the splendid Golden Dawn, also from Australia, and was lost in the 
shuffle of new varieties until I imported it from England. 
