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CHAPTER V. GROUPS and FAMILIES
LIKE ALL things living, in the world of mind or of matter, the rose is beautified, enlarged, and strengthened by a course of judicious and persevering culture, continued through successive generations. The art of horticulture is no leveller. Its triumphs are achieved by rigid systems of selection and rejection, founded always on the broad basis of intrinsic worth. The good cultivator propagates no plants but the best. He carefully chooses those marked out by conspicuous merit; protects them from the pollen of inferior sorts; intermarries them, perhaps, with other varieties of equal vigor and beauty; saves their seed, and raises from it another generation. From the new plants thus obtained he again chooses the best, and repeats with them the same process. Thus the rose and other plants are brought slowly to their perfect development. It is in vain to look for much improvement by merely cultivating one individual. Culture alone will not make a single rose double, or a dull rose brilliant. We cultivate the parent, and look for our reward in the offspring.
The village maiden has a beauty and a charm of her own; and so has her counterpart in the floral world,—the wild rose that grows by the roadside. Transplanted to the garden, and, with its offspring after it to the fourth and fifth generation, made an object of skilful culture, it reaches at last a wonderful development. The flowers which in the ancestress were single and small become double in the offspring, and expand their countless petals to the sun in all the majesty of the Queen of Flowers. The village maid has risen to regal state. She has lost her native virgin charm; but she sits throned and crowned in imperial beauty.
Now, all the roses of our gardens have some wild ancestress of the woods and meadows, from whom, in the process of successive generations, their beauties have been developed, sometimes by happy accidents, but oftener by design. Thus have arisen families of roses, each marked with traces of its parentage. These are the patricians of the floral commonwealth, gifted at once with fame, beauty, and rank.
The various wild roses differ greatly in their capacity of improvement and development. In some cases, the offspring grow rapidly, in color, fulness, and size, with every successive generation. In other cases, they will not improve at all; and the rose remains a wild rose still, good only for the roadside. With others yet, there seems to be a fixed limit, which is soon reached, and where improvement stops. It requires, even with the best, good culture and selection through several generations before the highest result appears. In horticulture, an element of stability is essential to progress. When the florist sees in any rose a quality which he wishes to develop and perfect, he does not look for success to the plant before him, but to the offspring which he produces from this plant. 'But this production and culture must be conducted 'wisely and skilfully, or the offspring will degenerate instead of improving.
There are different kinds of culture, with different effects. That which is founded in the laws of Nature, and aims at a universal development, produces for its result not only increased beauty, but increased symmetry, strength, and vitality. On the other hand, it is in the power of the skilful florist to develop or to repress whatever quality he may please. By artificial processes of culture, roses have been produced, beautiful in form and color, but so small, that the whole plant, it is said, might be covered with an egg-shell. These are results of the ingenious florists of China and Japan. The culture that refines without invigorating, belongs, it seems, to a partial or perverted civilization.