There are subtleties of beauty which cannot be decided by tape 
measures and many roses of yesterday have great charm, yet do not 
comply with today’s fashion. 
Unless you have a little of the collector’s instinct or can see something 
worth having which is not streamlined, efficient and completely modern, 
best you move on to the newer varieties, for interest in old roses requires 
a basic respect and feeling for the treasures of an earlier age and a desire 
to know and acquire them. 
I deem it most remarkable that, whereas only the rich can buy an 
ancient Greek statue or an old masterpiece or the handiwork of great 
craftsmen of the past, the selfsame roses that delighted Shakespeare and 
Bacon, served as models for 16th century Dutch painters, thrilled the 
Empress Josephine at Malmaison and graced the great French and English 
gardens of the 19th century—perhaps even the same rose which Sappho 
crowned the queen of flowers before the Christian era—the best of these 
old beauties we can buy today, to bloom and sweeten our gardens exactly 
as in days of old. 
The general public, especially the younger generation, barely knows 
that roses other than today’s exist or ever existed—and if a few have 
heard of Damasks, Centifolias, Rugosas, Moss Roses and Hybrid Per- 
petuals, these belong, to them, in a class with wooden iceboxes, doilies, 
oil lamps and Lillian Russell. 
For much of this tacit condemnation the old-rose growers of the last 30 
years are to blame. Many hundreds of varieties have been grown for 
collectors alone without regard for the tastes and expectations of the 
general rose public. Many have been too similar to other sorts, too brief in 
their bloom period—in short, relatively unimportant and undeserving of a 
public approval which was demanding more and more from the rose 
plants they purchased. 
While no positive figures are available, I estimate there are at least 1000 
named varieties of old-fashioned roses now in existence. Of these 200, pos- 
sibly 300, are distinctly different from modern roses in type of beauty, 
charm, fragrance and garden purpose, and are worthy an important 
place in every rose-garden of today. 
Es 
The ancestry of the old-fashioned roses is so ancient and complex that 
many cannot be classified with certainty, or can general rules be estab- 
lished for their culture. The many hybrids, however, can be described, 
rated and recommended, according to their individual characteristics. 
This we shall try to do herein. 
For if I wait, said she 
Till time for roses be, 
For the moss-rose and the musk-rose 
Maiden-blush and royal-dusk rose, 
What glory this for me 
In such a company? 
—ELIZABETH BaRRETT BROWNING 
