A Rose a Day No.11

This rose, named ‘Gloire de Dijon’, aka the ‘Glory Rose’, is classed as a Tea Rose, although often goes with the Noisettes. As one of the first Western yellow coloured and repeat-flowering roses, it is of some significance for the future development of the modern rose.

‘Gloire de Dijon’ was the first big success of the great French breeder Guillot fils, and dates from 1853, and for the rest of the century was one of the most acclaimed of all the new varieties.  Dean Hole, the greatest advocate of the rose in Victorian Britain (more on him in a future post)  wrote: ‘and if ever, for some heinous crime, I was miserably sentenced, for the rest of my life, to possess but a single Rose-tree, I should desire to be supplied, on leaving the dock, with a strong plant of Gloire de Dijon". More recently, Peter Beales, author of one of the most important books on old or ‘classic’ roses, writes: ‘This is a deservedly well-loved, old variety, made more famous by the writings of the Rev. Deans [sic] Hole, first President of the National Rose Society. This gentleman seems to have persuaded almost each new incumbent that the thing to do was plant one in the garden of every rectory in the late Victorian era.” 

Perhaps it was in a Nottingham rectory’s garden that D. H. Lawrence first made his acquaintance with ‘Gloire de Dijon’. In his greatest rose-poem, ‘Gloire de Dijon” (1917), he takes on the overcrowded poetic convention in which a beautiful woman is compared with a rose, and manages to rescue the cliché from the clutches of popular sentimentality on the one hand and idealism on the other. The woman Lawrence describes is Frieda von Richthofen, who left her family to live with him:

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders

Glisten as silver, they crumple up

Like wet and falling roses, and I listen

For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.

In the window full of sunlight

Concentrates her golden shadow

Fold on fold, until it glows as

Mellow as the glory roses.

Through the colour gold and the act of spying of a woman as she bathes, Lawrence assimilates his experience of the beauty of his lover to a long history via invoking the goddess of love, ‘Golden Aphrodite’, and Artemis, goddess of wild animals and the hunt. But by the simple act of naming a specific rose Lawrence also succeeds in making his vision credible and tangible, in contact with the real world.