Roses, Spring 2023!

It’s May, so that means the roses are in bloom throughout the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, including here in South Korea, and specifically, in my garden just a few miles from the DMZ.

Here are some pictures of roses in my garden. The first bloomer this year – on May 8th -   was the native species rose Rosa Rugosa, the ‘Rugged Rugosa’:

Rosa Rugosa in my garden in Korea. It’s is a native of these parts. The first rose to bloom this year.

As you can see, the species variety of this rose has flowers  that open wide to display five big purplish-red petals with bright yellow stamen. It repeats flowers, but each bloom only last a couple of days.  The cane is very prickly, and there are big showy hips throughout late summer and autumn. Rugosa means wrinkly in Latin, and  the terms refers to the characteristically corrugate leaves, which are dense and green, and turn golden yellow in late autumn.

The Rugosa is native to China, Korea, and Japan. In Chinese, the Rugosa is known simply as ‘meiguihua’ – simply, ‘rose’ – a sign of its predominance. In Japanese it is ‘hamanashi’ (‘Beach Aubergine’ – a reference to the large hips). Here in Korea they say ‘haedanghwa’ – (‘flower near the seashore’), a reference to the fact that the Rugosa can tolerate sandy soil and the salty air of the seaside. In Japan they were traditionally planted coastal areas to help stabilize beaches and dunes by retaining sand in the root cluster. Traditionally, it was used to make jam and various desserts, and as a pot-pourri. The Rugosa arrived in Europe from Japan in 1784, hence the primary association with that land, and the name ‘Ramanas’ seems to be a distortion of the Japanese name, which somehow metamorphised into ‘Hamanas’ and then into ‘Ramanas’. In the West, the Rugosa is also known colloquially as the ‘Letchberry’, ‘Beach Rose’, ‘Sea Rose’, ‘Salt-spray Rose’, ‘Japanese Rose’, ‘Ramanas Rose’, and, in the UK, the ‘Hedgehog Rose’ – on account of its thorniness. It is very useful as a hedging rose, and since its introduction in the West, has spread rampantly throughout Europe and North America, and in some regions is even considered an invasive pest.

There’s a wonderful poem by H. D.  (Hilda Doolittle) about the Rugosa, entitled ‘Sea Rose’:

Rose, harsh rose, 

marred and with stint of petals, 

meagre flower, thin, 

sparse of leaf, 

more precious 

than a wet rose 

single on a stem— 

you are caught in the drift. 

Stunted, with small leaf, 

you are flung on the sand, 

you are lifted 

in the crisp sand 

that drives in the wind. 

Can the spice-rose 

drip such acrid fragrance 

hardened in a leaf?

A couple of years ago we planted two specimens each of two Bourbon roses: ‘Louise Odier’ and ‘Variegata di Bologna’, which I was surprised to find on sale in a garden centre in south Seoul.  Both are mid-nineteenth century European creations.The Bourbon family of roses probably originally came into being by chance - as a ‘sport’ in the botanical terminology - on a small island in the Indian Ocean, the French colony named Île Bourbon, renamed Réunion by the Revolutionary government in 1793. Eventually, seeds found their way from Réunion to Paris, where Bourbons were introduced to commerce in the 1820s with great success. By mid-century there were dozens of varieties, including my two examples. The consensus is that ‘Parsons’ Pink China’ crossed with a Damask while growing in a hedge on the island. As such, the Bourbon can be considered the first natural cross in modern times between an eastern and western rose, which occurred  on ‘neutral’ territory, far from both.

The petals often make an almost perfect globe, and have an intense fragrance. is my ‘Variegata di Bologna’. As you can see, it gets it names from being bi-coloured (and being bred by an Italian):

‘Variegeta di Bologna’ in my garden.

Both my Bourbons can be purchased online from the British company David Austin Roses, the most famous rose breeders in the world today. Last year we planted one each of four different varieties of David Austin’s own ‘English roses’: ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, ‘Benjamin Britten’, ‘Generous Gardener’, and ‘Brother Cadfael’. 

The “English Rose’ called ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ growing in my garden. Note how different each bloom looks.

‘Benjamin Britten’

The stunning ‘Brother Cadfael.’

“Generous Gardener’ being generous in my garden.

As you can tell from the names Austin gives his roses, the goal is to conjure up something very British, redolent with noble heritage and high culture. Or, sort of. Gertrude Jekyll was the doyen of late Victorian and Edwardian gardening and a great exponent of the rose and the ‘cottage garden’. Benjamin Britten was an twentieth century English composer, who is most well known for his operas. But check out his amazing String Quartets (see the link below).   Brother Cadfael is a more contemporary, and at least for non-Brits or those too young to remember, more obscure , insofar as it’s named after a fictitious Welsh Benedictine monk living in western England in the twelfth century, the main character in a series of historical murder mysteries written during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and televised starring Derek Jacobi. The somewhat unappealing name ‘Generous Gardener’, was  apparently named for the National Gardens Scheme in the UK.  But it's a gorgeous rose. As The David Austin website writes, it ‘bears beautifully formed flowers, which nod gracefully on the stem. When the petals open they expose numerous stamens, providing an almost water lily-like effect. The flowers are a pale glowing pink and have a delicious fragrance with aspects of Old Rose, musk.’

What Austin succeeded in achieving was the merging of the best and nostalgic qualities of the old garden roses, like the Bourbons, Damasks, Albas, Noisettes, Musks, etc., with the best of the new, like the Hybrid Tea and Floribunda, so as to produce a wonderful new family of roses that are typically characterised, like the one’s in my garden, by big generous blossoms and lovely fragrances, but also the capacity to repeat bloom and face extremes of weather, pests, and diseases better than earlier bred roses.

In my book By Any Other Names. A Cultural History of the Rose I quote David Austin himself, writing in 1988:

An English Rose is, or should be, a Shrub Rose. According to variety, it may be considerably larger or even smaller than a Hybrid Tea. But whether large or small, the aim is that it should have a natural, shrubby growth. The flowers themselves are in the various forms of the Old Roses: deep or shallow cup shapes; rosette shapes; semi-double or single, or in any of the unlimited variations between these. They nearly always have a strong fragrance, no less than that of the Old Roses, and their colours often tend towards pastel shades, although there are deep pinks, crimsons, purples and rich yellows.. The aim has been to develop in them a delicacy of appearance that is too often lacking in so many of the roses of our time; to catch something of that unique charm which we associate with Old Roses. Furthermore, English Roses nearly all repeat flower well under suitable conditions.

In fact, these days many of  the ‘English Roses’ are not shrubs but climbers – both ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and ‘Generous Gardner’ are, and in our garden at least, ‘Benjamin Britten’ seems to want to make its way up our trellis. But Austin has managed to revolutionize the rose for us contemporaries. In my book I call his rose ‘postmodern’, in the sense that Austin hybridised valued qualities of the old and the new.

Here’s a picture of another rose from my garden, the floribunda named ‘Simplicity’. This rose is a seriously promiscuous bloomer! I arranged some of its bounty in a bottle and put them in my studio. Recent paintings by me can be glimpsed behind.

As the website Ludwig’s Roses right observes, ‘The name ‘Simplicity’ refers not only to her clean, simplistic appearance but just as much to her simplistic growth habit – a very easy rose to grow.’

Incidentally, my book about the rose is about to be published in Korean, and I’ll write more about this when it’s available.

Notes

The H.D. poem can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48188/sea-rose

Britten’s String Quartets can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Szv5TEBhg&list=PLexwM939sM9bHQEEllxm3tv9OPZXLs60u

David Austin’s quote is from The Heritage of the Rose (London: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1988), p.176

 Ludwig’s Roses: https://www.ludwigsroses.co.za