A Rose a Day No.36

This rose probably doesn’t look so different from the one’s growing in your garden on the local park. But in fact, it is a very, very important rose. It’s the first in the family of roses we mostly live with today: the Hybrid Teas.

It is called ‘La France’ and was presented to the world by the breeder Jean-Baptiste André Guillot, known as Guillot fils in 1867.

‘La France’ was the glorious culmination of the collective efforts of  European botanists and breeders over the previous fifty years to marry the best of the east with the best of the west. Somewhat immodestly, Guillot fils proudly named the new rose ‘La France’. It is pale silvery pink in colour, has globular double blooms, and grows to around 4-5 feet tall in a tight shrub-like structure. But for us, unlike for Guillot fils contemporaries, looking at a specimen of ‘La France’ will seem a familiar and not especially extraordinary experience  because ‘La France’ possesses most of the characteristics we routinely associate with the typical garden roses of today.

Guillot fils conscientiously built on the success of a family of recent rose mutations called the Hybrid Perpetuals. These were crosses with Portland, Chinas, and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about six feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose. 

But it wouldn’t be until the 1880s that the number of roses with similar hybrid ancestry and characteristics were numerous enough to warrant the naming of a whole new class, and it was an Englishman who was to see the real potential of roses like ‘La France.’ In the 1870s Henry Bennett began to breed what he termed ‘Pedigree Hybrids of the Tea Rose’, and in 1879 put in commerce ten of them at the same time.

The rose would never be the same again. As the authors of the Encyclopedia of Roses write succinctly: ‘Henry Bennett invented modern roses, the Hybrid Teas that flowered repeatedly, not as delicate glasshouse treasures, but as hardly garden plants. There is scarcely a rose in our gardens today that does not descend from Hybrid Teas of the Wiltshire “wizard”.