The moment when the roses are at their best is quite unlike any other. Mattapoisett’s village is full of them right now, cascading over walls, arbors, and fences and adorning gates and gazebos in one climactic summer gush.
There must be more roses here per square foot than anywhere, I think, making my way along Water Street, down Pearl, and around to Cannon. Delicate sprays of pink shower a sidewalk with silken petals overpowering the salt air with spicy deliciousness. Farther on, clusters of dainty Betty Prior roses smile girlishly beside an historic home. Then comes the classic portrait – red blooms against a white picket fence.
Although their visit is brief, roses define the New England summer as much as sailboats and clams.
When you consider their rich history, numerous varieties, and uncontested beauty, it’s understandable that roses are considered the most popular flowers in the world. They have seduced writers, artists, royalty (most notably the Empress Josephine), and the average gardener. I can’t think of another flower possessing as much mystique as the rose.
Shakespeare fell for them and the literary references to roses are many. In the closing lines of Sonnet 109, rose imagery is used to symbolize the speaker’s beloved: “For nothing this wide universe I call/ Save thou, my Rose; in it thou are my all.”
Acclaimed writer and Harvard Professor Michael Pollan, author of “Second Nature,” cites several allusions to roses in a chapter devoted to roses: “ …the War of the Roses… the crown of thorns… rosy-fingered dawn… sub rosa… Rose is a rose is a rose… the rosary… the Roseicrucians… The Romance of the Rose… the Rose Bowl… the bed of roses… by any other name would smell as sweet… Dante’s yellow rose of Paradise… through rose-colored glasses… Rosebud… Tennyson’s white rose of virginity… Aphrodite’s flower… the Virgin Mary’s too… blood of Adonis… symbol of love, purity, transience, eternity… symbol, it seems, of symbols.”
Mr. Pollan writes with humor and wisdom about his experience growing roses on a farm in Connecticut. This provocative passage extolling a particular old rose helps explain their seductive appeal:
“I had by now read so much about old roses that I frankly doubted they could live up to their billing. But Madame Hardy was beautiful. From a small, undistinguished bud emerged a tightly wound bundle of pure porcelain-white petals that were held in a perfect half-globe as if by an invisible teacup. The petals were innumerable yet not merely a mass; more ladylike than that, the fine tissue of Madame Hardy’s petals was subtly composed into the quartered form of a rosette, and the blooms made me think of the rose window of Gothic cathedrals, which had not before looked to me anything like a rose.”
Calling Madame Hardy as “an expression of another time,” Pollan relates how Josephine’s gardener had bred the flower and named it for his wife. “She embodies the classic form of the old roses, and comes closer to the image the word rose has conjured in people’s minds for most of Western history than does the rose in our florist shops today. When Shakespeare compared his love to a rose, this must have been pretty much what he had in mind. To look closely at the bloom of an antique rose is at least in some small way, an exercise of the historical imagination. You see it through your own eyes, yet also through the eyes of another time.”
Once smitten, it’s hard to imagine a garden without roses. They add a certain finishing touch. Anyone who grows roses knows that these queens of flowers are high maintenance. From planting to pruning to watering and nurturing. Not to mention handling the many pests and numerous afflictions that may blight them. This doesn’t hold us back from our love affair, it only makes us more determined to succeed.
I have learned what works for me – much preferring a strongly scented bloom over the ones that are faint. Years ago, the noted New Bedford nurseryman Allen Haskell recommended Dublin Bay as a choice red climber for my front arbor. I didn’t disagree that this was indeed a stunner, but it just did not perfume the air as I’d hoped. So, I recommend taking this into consideration when choosing a rose – choose with not just your eyes but your other senses as well.
In a long-ago rose wish list, I had wanted two French roses dating back to the 1800s: Blanc Double de Coubert, described by Gertrude Jekyll as “the whitest rose of any known” and Zephirine Drouhin, a cerise pink climber with thornless canes and a quaint cottage look. It took me a long time to get around to achieving my wish – with lots of other spur-of-the-moment purchases preceding.
I found Zephirine at Roseland the other day while guiding my friend Nancy through the legions of roses and we both surrendered to her combined appeal – color, scent, and lack of thorns. There are many other beauties and as we made our way through them, we swooned, moved in close for a waft of their perfume and stood back in utter awe at so many beautiful roses. It may seem daunting choosing, but you’ve got to get in there and as I told Nancy, “You’ll know it when you find the right one!”
Because variety is the spice of life – particularly true with roses – she rounded up her shopping with the addition of another climber, Pearly Gates, which has exquisite large pastel pink flowers befitting their heavenly name. Nancy also found a very different proposition in the groundcover rose Playful Happy Trails which I likewise took home for a vacant spot in the front border. Cousin to Rainbow Happy Trails and patented by Weeks Roses it is in a word, winsome, with a sort of sweet charm of an Ellie May or (if you remember the films) Tammy conveyed in bright red petals with a gold center.
There is a rose for every kind of garden and gardener. Once under their spell, you just might find you have the necessary time to keep them in your garden and your life.
“There is simply the rose; it is perfect every moment of its existence.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean