The Art Of Gardening With Roses

Natural History, May, 1999 by Anne Raver

The Art of Gardening with Roses, by Graham Stuart Thomas. Henry Holt and Company, 1991; 160pp.; out of print.

Flower aficionados cultivate their bookshelves as well as their gardens. One writer lists her perennial favorites.

The trouble with many books about flowers is that they are written for and by gardeners. Unfortunately, while the information imparted is often invaluable, the tone can be ponderous. I often find myself wanting to encourage the writer to lighten up. As my mother says, "It's just plants."

The flower books I like tell stories about the gardeners who write them. I like cranks and opinionated types, such as Christopher Lloyd. In The Adventurous Gardener, Lloyd digs in his garden at Great Dixter and rails at his butterfly bush, Buddleia fallowiana `Alba': "I gave this overpraised shrub a shrewd dismissive backward cow-kick some time ago, and that should have settled its hash." He had just grown it to fill a gap in his beloved privet hedge, but of course at the very moment he decided to yank it out, "the doomed buddleia chose to excel itself."

Some of the very best garden writers are those who slip in a bit of crucial information with the left hand as they tell their stories. Sometimes this valuable advice is not so much about growing flowers as enjoying them. In One Man's Garden, Henry Mitchell, who wrote the Washington Post's "Earthman" column for twenty-three years, took two weeks off work one year to enjoy his irises at their peak, "and I sat there and strolled there morning to night." He never regretted that "day-after-day saturation" and couldn't understand why more gardeners don't do the same.

"It is curious to me that so many gardeners occupy their leisure making things neat and tidy," Mitchell writes. "It is one thing to trot past a fine bush of, say, `Mrs. Anthony Waterer' laden with attar-scented blooms, and another thing to settle down and gaze at it for an hour. What is the point of growing a rose in the first place if you just admire it in passing? It is like dogs," he continues. "They are a sufficient headache and expense that there is no earthly point in having them if they're not all over the place at all hours."

Mitchell died in 1993, and I sorely miss his weekly adventures. But his muddy old hounds live on in his prose, as does the picture he paints of himself, lugging some agave "the size of a Volkswagen" down the garden path.

Another writer with an astute observational eye and a mine of practical advice is Graham Stuart Thomas, the author of more than a dozen books, including two devoted to his paintings. Thomas brought Europe's old roses back from oblivion during World War II and advised the National Trust for twenty years on the restoration of hundreds of gardens. In The Art of Gardening with Roses, he sorts out the shapes, scents, and histories of old shrub roses and climbers at Mottisfont Abbey near Southampton, England, and describes their proper companion plants, such as yellow foxglove and the bluish gray Echinops.

But my bible for roses is The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book, in which a history of these plants is peppered with quotations ranging from Shakespeare to E.A. Bowles, another venerable British gardener. Stuart, who writes that he distinctly remembers "delighting in the fragrance of the Hybrid Perpetual `Mrs. John Laing' at the age of eight," describes every rose with the concrete details befitting both a poet and a scientist. I remember admiring the new leaves of a rose I had planted in a big pot on my roof garden in Brooklyn Heights and trying in vain to recall the exact color and scent of the blossom the plant would soon produce. I went downstairs for my dog-eared, mud-stained copy of Thomas's Rose Book, which opened immediately to a watercolor of the very `Roseraie de l'Hay' on my roof. The caption described it as "deliciously redolent of cloves and fairly continuous in bloom until autumn." By the time the blossom Opens to a good four-and-a-half inches, Thomas observes, it is an "intense rich crimson-purple, with cream stamens lighting the center, from which radiate folded petals."

Thomas, who is ninety this year, has recently produced a collection of essays entitled Cuttings from My Garden Notebooks, in which he muses about many things: the intriguing shape of the perennial pea flowers (and which ones are scented or invasive); the differences in color, shape, and scent among his favorite rhododendrons; and the sturdy reliability of lilac-blue monkshoods in September. There is a lack of pretentiousness in his clear-eyed prose, which makes perfect reading for the nights when one wakes up dreaming of the garden.

Some nights, however, or days too cold or wet to venture outside, I turn to the writings of novelists and poets for words that capture the essence of plants. In Flowers and Fruit, Colette writes about medicinal herbs, Redoute's roses, and the wild gardens of her late-nineteenth-century childhood in Burgundy: "What more did our garden's reputation need than an indefatigable hundred-year-old honeysuckle, than the cascading wistaria and the nymph's-thigh rose? From these three, climbing and loosening the iron railing, twisting a gutter and creeping under the slate tiles of a roof, I learned what is meant by profusion, by cloying perfumes and their surfeit of sweetness."