York and Lancaster Rose.
The fragrance of the sweetest Roses—the Damask, the Cabbage, the York and Lancaster—is beyond any other flower-scent, it is irresistible, enthralling; you cannot leave it. You can push aside a Syringa, a Honeysuckle, even a Mignonette, but there is a magic something which binds you irrevocably to the Rose. I have never doubted that the Rose has some compelling quality shared not by other flowers. I know not whether it comes from centuries of establishment as a race-symbol, or from some inherent witchery of the plant, but it certainly exists.
The variety of Roses known to old American gardens, as to English gardens, was few. The English Eglantine was quickly established here in gardens and spread to roadsides. The small, ragged, cheerful little Cinnamon Rose, now chiefly seen as a garden stray, is undoubtedly old. This Rose diffuses its faint "sinamon smelle" when the petals are dried. Nearly all of the Roses vaguely thought to be one or two hundred years old date only, within our ken, to the earlier years of the nineteenth century. The Seven Sisters Rose, imagined by the owner of many a Southern garden to belong to colonial days, is one of the family Rosa multiflora, introduced from Japan to England by Thunberg. Its catalogue name is Greville. I think the Seven Sisters dates back to 1822. The clusters of little double blooms of the Seven Sisters are not among our beautiful Roses, but are planted by the house mistress of every Southern home from power of association, because they were loved by her grandmothers, if not by more distant forbears. The crimson Boursaults are no older. They came from the Swiss Alps and therefore are hardy, but they are fussy things, needing much pruning and pulling out. I recall that they had much longer prickles than the other roses in our garden. The beloved little Banksia Rose came from China in 1807. The Madame Plantier is a hybrid China Rose of much popularity. We have had it about seventy or eighty years. In the lovely garden of Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, author of Flowers and Trees in their Haunts, I saw, this spring, a giant Madame Plantier which had over five thousand buds, and which could scarcely be equalled in beauty by any modern Roses. Its photograph gives scant idea of its size.
What gratitude we have in spring to the Sweetbrier! How early in the year, from sprouting branch and curling leaf, it begins to give forth its pure odor! Gracious and lavish plant, beloved in scent by every one, you have no rival in the spring garden with its pale perfumes. The Sweetbrier and Shakespeare's Musk Rose (Rosa moschata) are said to be the only Roses that at evening pour forth their perfume; the others are what Bacon called "fast of their odor."
The June Rose, called by many the Hedgehog Rose, was, I think, the first Rose of summer. A sturdy plant, about three feet in height; set thick with briers, it well deserved its folk name. The flowers opened into a saucer of richest carmine, as fragrant as an American Beauty, and the little circles of crimson resembling the Rosa rugosa were seen in every front dooryard.
Cinnamon Roses.