Ah, shrub roses and lady novelists. Yes, all right, I have had shrub roses. Definitely the rose of choice for the discriminating gardener in the mid and late twentieth century. And the rose can indeed be said to be a socially indicating plant; more on that in due course. Angus Wilson’s couple had a small private garden tucked away beyond the nursery:
At the moment iris reticulata gleamed purple and gold here and there in the sunshine, and a great mass of mauve iris stylosa still basked in the dusty, rubble-filled soil by the wall. Next there would be knots of crocus, daffodils and fritillary edging the lawn – in what Gordon had called ‘our very pleasing, vulgar little spring show’. Later the beds were massed with tulips and later still with lilies. There were rose beds with hybrid tea and floribunda – for they were no rose specialists – but in Gordon’s words ‘never a chic shrub rose’.
There, the shrub rose is used to give Gordon and David a gardening taste that is so refined that it steps aside from the gardening practice of those who are just ordinarily discriminating. And there is another significant point: the reference to Iris stylosa and ‘dusty, rubble-filled soil’ tells me that Angus Wilson was a gardener himself. To know that Iris stylosa requires that kind of site is quite an arcane piece of gardening knowledge and I don’t think he would have written that had he not, in all probability, grown that iris himself at some point, somewhere. All novelists move on to dangerous territory when they devise a character with a background unfamiliar to them. Most do it and have to rely on research and enquiry, knowing that any slip-up will provoke comment from some sharp-eyed reader. But sometimes what looks to be natural accuracy is a giveaway too: I feel sure that Angus Wilson gardened.
We are in snob country here, of course. I find myself not all that keen on Gordon and David with their patronage of – effectively – all gardeners who are not them. And Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is a positive study of snobbery; she was the arch connoisseur and practitioner. Any discussion of social indicators invites the snobbery challenge, and this whole section has to take on that risk, but this is too intriguing an aspect of gardens, and gardening, to be ignored. We garden differently according to who we are. Karel Čapek was making that point, in his pre-war Czech way, when he distinguished between the window-boxes of the rich and the poor. It would have been interesting to learn what, later, a totalitarian window-box looked like.
I live in a part of London that has jumped, in seventy years or so, from working class/lower-middle class to distinctly affluent. Window-boxes abound, and I would guess always have done, but there is no one now to tell me what the window-box of the 1950s was like. Today’s are various; this morning I noted that more people plump for the geranium than for anything else, with some forays into petunias, fuchsias, trailing begonias (my own, disregarding Monty Don’s recent condemnation of these on Gardeners’ World), and some fastidious departures by way of neat balls of box hedging, a delectable planting of blue pansies in a silver-grey metal window-box, an elegant combination of white petunias and bacopa. By their windows ye shall know them.
Now, where is this garden?
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the ‘grand tour’, and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with ‘specimen’ trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.
Clearly, this is socially elevated gardening, snob gardening. And, indeed, it is the epitome of that: the garden of the Van der Luydens, in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, who are the very apex of New York society in the late nineteenth century, a couple so strangled by ancestral glory as to be almost incapable of spontaneous speech. The central figure, Newland Archer, is a young man who married a girl from within that closed community of the wealthy and socially hidebound, but falls in love with Ellen Olenska, a woman who is of the ‘tribe’ but has returned from Europe after having left a philandering Polish husband, and so is regarded as tainted and suspect. The story turns on the subtle and successful manoeuvres of the families concerned to force Ellen back to Europe and out of Newland’s life.
The description of the garden precedes one of the few, intense scenes between the lovers; Ellen is spending the weekend at the van der Luydens, during the period of her acceptance in polite society, and Newland visits her. The garden is there as further background to the lifestyle of these hugely prosperous and entirely self-absorbed families: power gardening, statement gardening. And the subtext of the novel is a scalding indictment of the rigid attitudes and requirements of that society. There is a parallel account later of a further garden, pertaining to another of the families: ‘The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.’ Cast-iron ornaments seem to have been de rigueur, and the scarlet geranium and coleus combination has me shuddering.
I think Edith Wharton would have shuddered too, in real life, because the interesting thing is that she herself was a passionate gardener, or rather, creator of gardens. Wealthy, ferociously energetic, she created four gardens: one in Massachusetts and three in France, where she spent most of her life. She was knowledgeable, had written a book on Italian villas and their gardens, and was familiar with the works of Jekyll and Robinson. Her French gardens sound delectable, one at Saint-Brice, in the Île-de-France, with box-hedged parterres, a woodland space, a pond with fountain, a potager, an orchard, rose garden and blue garden, an avenue of lilies. This is lavish gardening, no-expense-spared gardening, but a far cry from the stifled garden style of that New York society she wrote about so eloquently. And, indeed, Hermione Lee, her biographer, has pointed out that in the seventeen years she spent at Saint-Brice, and at Sainte-Claire in the south of France – another major operation and elaborate design – she made no fictional use of these experiences: her fictional gardens are precise, accurate, and are there as ballast to the narrative; her own gardening life was a world apart.
Yellow Book garden visiting can cover a wide range of gardens, though I suspect that the gimlet eye of those who inspect applicant gardens on behalf of the National Garden Scheme is a tad more inclined to favour the socially aspiring garden. That said, the determinedly traditional garden featured quite a bit when we used to do some Yellow Book tourism thirty years ago, especially where a group village opening offered half a dozen or so neighbouring gardens ranging from the expansive affair attached to some Old Rectory that featured tasteful old roses, a white border, a clematis-hung pergola, a little pool with water lilies, flag irises and sisyrinchium, to the council-house garden with emphatic block plantings of annuals – calceolaria, red salvia, marigolds, a ribbon edging of white alyssum. This latter inclination seems to me to be the last gasp of Victorian carpet bedding, and actually is admirable in the sense that very probably all will have been grown from seeds – skilful gardening, in fact. But no longer either fashionable or classy. And if such a garden had a rose it would be one of the most flamboyant hybrid teas – ‘Peace’ – or that hybrid tea/floribunda cross ‘Queen Elizabeth’, both of them large, gaudy, and virtually indestructible.
Many plants are social indicators, and the rose is certainly that, hence the pointed references to
roses in Angus Wilson’s novel, striking a chord at once with the rose-sensitive reader. I was a relative rose innocent when we acquired the garden in Oxfordshire, and I realized at once that its previous owner had been both knowledgeable and fastidious. She had bequeathed us three big old shrub roses, two of which I never could identify, but one was ‘Rosa Mundi’ – Rosa gallica ‘Versicolor’ – and up the front of the house was the climber ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, both of these roses of choice for the connoisseur. We were off to a good start, and I winced a bit at the memory of the bed of ‘Iceberg’ I had established in a previous garden – amiable hard-working white floribunda but somewhat unimaginative on my part.
It seems appropriate to consider the rose at some length: the one flower that everyone recognizes, the most ubiquitous of all garden plants, the most symbolic of flowers. Exquisite, wonderfully various, difficult. Christopher Lloyd, that celebrated gardener, staggered the gardening world when he junked his renowned rose garden at Great Dixter and created a tropical garden instead, calling roses ‘miserable and unsatisfactory shrubs’. And gardeners may have been shocked, but will have taken the point. My grandmother had a large rose garden, sunken, very Jekyll/Lutyens in design, with an iris-fringed pool in the centre, and much of her life was spent in the struggle against black spot: I can see her still, wearing that hessian apron with pocket stuffed with twine, secateurs, trowel, furiously spraying. The rose can be wayward, sulky, ungrateful, it bites back; I was out with my meagre few this morning, dead-heading, and have a sore thumb now where ‘Evelyn’ stabbed me. But … but it is also glorious, sui generis, ancient.
A rose appears on a Minoan fresco, 3,500 years old. Theophrastus was distinguishing cultivated from wild roses in the fourth century BC. Pliny wrote of them, and there they are on those wonderful Pompeiian garden frescoes. The rose came into the garden from the wild; there are around 150 species of wild rose, native only to the northern hemisphere, and particularly favouring China – hence the arrival in the West of what were called China roses in the eighteenth century. Rose breeders have been tampering with the rose for centuries: the roses we have today are the result of tampering on a historic and majestic scale – hybridization, to be correct – a process that has given us the extraordinary range and variety that have been available for many years now, all descended from the three groups of Gallicas, Damasks and Albas. Jennifer Potter’s magisterial work The Rose describes this process with an eloquence that is almost biblical: ‘the first Chinas mated with the European Gallicas and Damasks to beget the Bourbons, which then crossed and recrossed with the Portlands, the Chinas and the hybrid Chinas to produce the Hybrid Perpetuals; and the China Teas came together with the Hybrid Perpetuals to beget the Hybrid Teas, which then crossed on the one hand with the Dwarf Polyanthas or Polyantha Pompoms to beget the Hybrid Polyanthas …’ I love this – fascinating, the determined pursuit of an ever-more perfect rose, a new variety, a more delicate scent, a more elegant fusion of reds and pinks and yellows and creams and whites and all the shades between and beyond. A new growth habit, a more tenacious resistance to disease. And it goes on still. David Austin’s celebrated English Roses have introduced 190 new rose cultivars, making around 150,000 crosses a year, resulting in a quarter of a million seedlings which, at the end of a nine-year cycle, will give the breeder three or more new roses a year. It was his ‘Evelyn’ that stabbed me just now; well worth it, she is superb – pink/apricot/peach, with an intoxicating scent.
Beyond the actual rose there is the symbolic rose, the flower that seems to have harvested more symbolism than any other. A symbol of silence, discretion, for the Romans, who had dining-room ceilings painted with roses so that guests were reminded that what was spoken in drink was ‘sub rosa’ only, a custom that was revived in the seventeenth century. It is the emblem of that peculiar Protestant sect of the same period, the Rosicrucians, who held mystical beliefs apparently related to alchemy, with, it seems, descendent secret societies still around today. Their symbol had the rose fused with the Christian cross – the flower that also symbolized eternal love modifying the symbol of sacrifice. The association with love and sexuality goes back to the Greeks – the rose sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of love – and persists thereafter, and today, with all those red roses that fill the supermarkets for Valentine’s Day. A Georgia O’Keeffe rose painting is a manifestation of the rose as image of female sexuality, though the artist dislikes this interpretation.
Religion, eroticism, and then the rose gets political, with the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster – a symbol of war, indeed, the Wars of the Roses. Taken over entirely by the Tudors, it becomes their emblem, that stylized, instantly recognizable rose – hijacked as a dynastic, political emblem.
Plenty of medicinal applications, from earliest times, used as an oil or rosewater as remedy at one time or another for just about everything from a headache onwards. In a later age, it has declined to becoming simply the basis for pot-pourri (dried rose petals placed in bowls around the house for their scent), which I remember making once in industrial quantities, and then discovering that you end up with a lot of brown petals that don’t smell of much for long. However, it seems that in 2008 a breakthrough in medical research was suggesting that a form of rose-hip powder might be effective in the treatment of arthritis. I read of this with interest, and wait to have it offered on the NHS.
And the dried rose petal has an urgent contemporary use. Forget pot-pourri – rose petals are confetti now. Environmentally undesirable paper confetti is banned by churches; the substitute is dried rose-petal confetti – nicely biodegradable. We discovered this in the course of planning for my granddaughter Rachel’s wedding this year – and that there is an entire small industry selling the stuff, various websites, all charging what seemed like inflated prices. Right, this we can do ourselves. Family and friends were exhorted to get out there and sacrifice their roses (dead won’t do – they must be in full flower, or just about to go over). You spread the petals out, well spaced, on newspaper, somewhere warm and dry, and lo! After three or four days you have acceptable confetti.
Most gardeners develop a personal relationship with roses, planting the same ones again and again, in garden after garden; in my own, and in family gardens, ‘Buff Beauty’ and ‘New Dawn’ crop up time and again, along with ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and ‘Constance Spry’. We always had a ‘Penelope’ – of course. Actually, a good bushy hybrid musk shrub rose with creamy pink flowers. It seems to have been introduced by an English cleric called Joseph Pemberton in 1924, but I can’t find who was the Penelope in question. It is the ultimate honour to have a rose named after you. My present garden is far too small to accommodate ‘Penelope’, and I miss it. A favourite rose can map human habitation: Jennifer Potter tells of how an early American rose called ‘Harison’s Yellow’ was taken west by the pioneers of the 1840s and 1850s, its descendants thus mapping the course of the immigrant trails across the country. This makes me think at once of the loquat, its presence in north London gardens indicating that Greek Cypriots once lived here.
In fact, North America has always been as passionate about roses as Europe. Eleanor Perényi writes knowledgeably about the complexities of hybridization, but also a touch irritably, pointing out that sometimes the eternal pursuit of yet another novelty, another variation, can produce monstrosity, in her view, citing ‘Ambassador’, introduced in 1980, and ‘glistening apricot … This range, a clamouring chorus of Sunkist oranges and corals … look hideous planted with other, traditionally colored roses.’ I have just summoned up ‘Ambassador’ on the internet, and I quite agree. She is more charitable than I am about flamboyant ‘Peace’, and considers it beautiful, stressing its ‘romantic’ story – bred by the French rose grower Meilland before the war, who sent his few cuttings to America to save them, those consigned to the American grower Robert Pyke being on the last plane to leave France in November 1940, before the German invasion. That rose was cultivated in America, and launched in 194
5, with its iconic name. It is said to be the world’s favourite rose, so I am quite out of step. But when Perényi writes of roses growing in the eastern United States, and the need to ‘smother bushes in salt hay and wrap standards like mummies or bury them alive’, I am startled. Roses not hardy! Needing winter protection! We forget how well off we gardeners are in this country’s temperate climate – conditions that might have been designed for gardening.
This digression into the matter of the rose was prompted by its occasional role as social indicator. More generally, it is simply present in most gardens as the archetypal flower, the essential garden plant. I suppose you could say that possession of a garden is itself a social indicator, though that wouldn’t be quite true – central London mansion flats worth millions don’t have gardens. But a government report of 2009 reckoned that by the following year 2.16 million homes would be without a private garden. It was expected that by 2020 just 89 per cent of households were likely to have a garden (actually, I’m surprised it is that many), and this decline was blamed on the increased building of flats by developers, and the easy permission to build on gardens, designated as ‘brownfield’ land. In London two-thirds of front gardens are paved or concreted over. I remember that back when I was writing for children, in the 1980s, politically correct children’s book editors reminded authors sternly that a garden is not an appropriate feature in a children’s book, on the grounds that most – or many – children don’t have one, forgetting that we read to escape and expand our circumstances, not to replicate them. I suppose that Tom’s Midnight Garden would have been suspect.