A Rose a Day No. 33
This is my final post to celebrate the publication of my new book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’. It is a picture of ‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’, and we used it as the cover image of the book.
To the Chinaman who painted 'Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’ this rose would have been known as ‘Dan Huang Xian Shui’ - ‘Light Yellow Sweet Water Rose’.
The painting comes from one of the most interesting collections of botanical art from China, which was amassed in the early nineteenth century by the Englishman John Reeves, an East India Company tea inspector and amateur botanist. Reeves was stationed in China with the Company prior to the First Opium War (1839-42), and collected plants in and around Canton in his spare time, and was often frustrated by having to use Chinese gardeners as go-between due to the restrictions imposed on foreigners. He had the capital idea of hiring Chinese artists to paint what he did get his hands on, and in all, Reeves amassed over 800 pictures. Only 16 are roses, but they include this wonderful one.
Interestingly, the painting shows a specimen entirely without prickles. The rigours of botanical art must have appealed to the anonymous Chinese artist-artisans who were already accustomed to working in water-based paints on paper, and so could adapt easily to accurate linear outline and the suppression of a plausibly three-dimensional contextual location. Such characteristics, unusual outside botanical painting in the West, were already an inherent part of the rich flower painting genre within the Chinese tradition. An interesting feature of the paintings is that they often show decomposition as well as juvenescence and maturity – for example, decayed and broken leaves. Such features are absent from Redouté’s work. Perhaps the Chinese artists, taking to heart Reeve’s requirement of empirical accuracy, considered it useful to show a greater part of the plant’s lifecycle. Anyway, it was on the strength of the painting that the Horticultural Society of London to have the rose sent westwards.
The original paintings from Reeves collection are in the Royal Horticultural Society, and when I examined them I was struck by the fact that they were made on two kinds of paper – the more prestigious were on specially prepared watercolour paper from England, the smaller ones on traditional Chinese paper. The former paper was intended to be robust enough to survive the humid climatic conditions in China, and a long ocean voyage, but today these papers are discoloured, foxed, and showing signs of atmospheric pollution, while the local product has survived almost pristine into the twenty-first century.
‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’, discovered - or at least, ‘discovered’ by a Westerner - by John Damper Parks in 1824. It is a repeat bloomer, has a vigorous growth habit, bright green leaves, and very large double or semi-double flowers with an average diameter of 4 inches, which have the unusual characteristic of being straw or sulphur yellow in colour. The petals are thick and mildly scented – ‘tea scented’. But the consensus is that although this rose is officially still commercially available it actually disappeared 100 years ago.
‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’ became on the four ‘studs’ that between 1792 and 1824 were picked with the specific intention of crossing them with Western homegrown varieties. Together, the resulting mutations caused the enormous changes in the range and characteristics of the rose’s gene pool.
The other three ‘studs’ are: ‘Parsons’ Pink Rose’, ‘Slater’s Crimson’, ‘Hume’s Blush Tea-Scented China’ . Along with a few other native roses, these China and Tea Roses made possible most of the transformations that characterize the rose plant we know today: a bush-like, robust, garden plant with a wide variety of coloured flowers that are large, semi-double, high-centred, and bloom continuously from May to late autumn.