Nature has richly endowed the earth with roses. Every country can offer its wild-rose tributes on Flora's shrine, with but one single exception, and that Australia. There are over eighty varieties of the wild rose known, the greater number being indigenous to Asia.
With experimenting and cultivating, varieties of roses have multiplied by hundreds; and rose culture, like everything else in this nineteenth century, has become a science.
Roses are like children, requiring warmth and affection. In a mild climate, where the seasons do not vary greatly in regard to temperature, the rose outvies tradition itself, and unfolds and matures with a regularity quite astonishing.
California climate is nature's elected home for roses. In almost any portion of the State removed from the immediate harsh influences of the coast, roses revel, from the tiniest boutonniere rose, with its pert little face, to that great lusty fellow, big as a large saucer and as hardy as a cabbage.
To the old residents, no rose in California appeals more to the poetical sense than the old Castilian, one of the oldest varieties in the State, and one now greatly despised by its more fortunate and voluptuous sisters. The fragrance of this rose is incomparable, its color an intense glowing old pink, its foliage painfully disappointing. Having such a vigorous and healthy trunk and lusty system of roots, the Castilian is employed largely to graft other stock upon.
An ideal climate should produce nothing but ideal forms. This natural and just hypothesis is amply proven in presenting the full array of California roses as evidence. What better class of evidence could be desired?
There are several general groups into which California roses are usually divided: Tea roses, Bourbon roses, hybrid perpetual roses, China or Bengal roses, moss and climbing roses.
Of these classes, but several can be mentioned. Roses, as a theme, are practically inexhaustible, and the few kinds that appeal most strongly to the writer's sympathies will receive a passing word.
A rose-covered cottage, the material expression of peace, lowliness, beauty, and picturesqueness; a picture that most of us mirror in our minds in youth as connected with great and simple happiness. Many of the old Spanish houses of California are overrun with climbing roses. These old houses, simple in style of architecture, broad and square in appearance, are inviting abodes for the clinging loveliness of California's climbers.
Some fine April morning take a little trip to San Rafael, one of San Francisco's suburban villages. In this hill-girth town blooms the fairest rose of all the climbers. Some call it the "San Rafael Rose," others the "Beauty of Blazenwood."