Pride of Washington.—A rosy lilac, and double.
There are several other varieties in this class, but the preceding are the best.
[CHAPTER III.]
GENERAL CULTURE OF THE ROSE.
As before stated, the Rose was the theme of the earliest poets of antiquity; and it was doubtless one of the first plants selected to adorn the gardens which were laid out around the new habitations constructed upon the exchange of the wandering for a civilized mode of life.
The most ancient authors upon husbandry, whose works are extant, have all treated of the culture of Roses: Theophrastus among the Greeks; and among the Romans, Varro, Columella, Palladius, and Pliny. To Pliny are we specially indebted for information on this subject, as the entire fourth chapter of the twentieth book of his Natural History is devoted to Roses; and they are also occasionally mentioned in other parts of the work. But after all the information thus obtained, much yet remains to be desired; and although we find in other ancient authors some curious facts bearing upon other points in the history of the Rose, they are mostly so general in their character as to give us very little insight into the actual culture of the Rose at those periods.
The profuseness with which they were used among the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and other ancient nations in their religious solemnities, their public ceremonies, and even in the ordinary customs of private life, would lead us to suppose, and with some degree of correctness, that roses were very abundantly cultivated by them all; and we are inclined to think that their cultivation was then far more general than at the present time, although the art of producing them was in its infancy. However surprising in other respects may have been the progress of the culture of roses within forty years, particularly in France, Holland, and Belgium, there can be little doubt that, although the Romans were acquainted with a much smaller number of varieties than the moderns, yet flowers of those varieties were far more abundant than the aggregate quantity of flowers of all the varieties of roses cultivated at the present day. It cannot be positively asserted that the Remontant Roses of the present time were unknown at Rome, since the gardeners of that city practiced sowing the seeds of the Rose, by which mode many of the most remarkable varieties of that class have been obtained by modern cultivators. The Romans, however, preferred to propagate by cuttings, which produced flowering plants much sooner than those from the seed.
But, though the Romans may have had roses of the same species with some of those which we now cultivate, it is scarcely probable that these species could have continued until this period, and escaped the devastation attendant on the revolutions of empire, or the more desolating invasions of the Huns and Goths. Thus it is, that those roses of Pæstum, to which allusion is so frequently made by ancient writers, and which, according to Virgil and Pliny, bloomed semi-annually, and were common in the gardens of that city, are not now to be found. Jussieu and Loudresse, two French gentlemen, successively visited Italy with the express object of finding this twice-bearing Rose in Pæstum or its environs, yet, notwithstanding their carefully prosecuted researches, they could find no traces of it whatever.