This is a wide digression from the subject of garden Roses, and yet excusable in that it can scarcely be too often urged that any attempt to practise anything in horticulture for no better reason than because it is the fashion, can only lead to debasement and can only achieve futility.
Now that there are large numbers of people who truly love their gardens, and who show evidence of it by giving them much care and thought and loving labour, the old garden Roses have been sought for and have been restored to their former place of high favour. And our best nurserymen have not been slow to see what would be acceptable in well-cared-for gardens throughout the length and breadth of the land; so that the last few years have seen an extraordinary activity in the production of good Roses for garden effect. The free-growing Rosa polyantha of the Himalayas has been employed as a seed or pollen-bearing parent, and from it have been developed first the well-known Crimson
“VISCOUNTESS FOLKESTONE”
FROM THE PICTURE IN THE POSSESSION OF
Mr. R. Clarke Edwards
Rambler, and later a number of less showy but much more refined flowers of just the right kind for free use in garden decoration.
Valuable hybrids have also been raised from the Tea Roses, one of the best known of them being Viscountess Folkestone, the subject of the picture; a grand Rose for grouping in beds or clumps, and one that yields its large, loose, blush-white flowers abundantly and for a long season. This merit of an extended blooming season runs through the greater number of the now long list of varieties of the beautiful hybrid Teas.
Some of the new seedling Tea Roses have nearly single flowers, and are none the less beautiful, as those wise folk well know who grow Corallina and the lovely white Irish Beauty, and its free-blooming companion Irish Glory. These also are plants that will succeed, as will most of the hybrid Teas, in some poor hot soils where most Roses fail.