A Rose a Day No.32
The erotic ambiance created by roses is definitely theme of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’ (1864-68).
"Verticordia" means ‘who changes hearts’, and the theme of the redemptive power of sexual love is given an explicit pictorial treatment. A lustrous, red-headed woman is shown bare-breasted and surrounded by flowers – Centifolia Roses behind her and honeysuckle in front. She holds Cupid’s arrow in her right hand, and an apple – symbol of temptation, but also of the judgement of Paris - in the other. Yellow butterflies, symbol of hope and guidance and of the soul, perch on the apple and arrow, and bedeck her halo. But it is the powerful reds of the flowers that make the biggest impression. In the popular ‘language of flowers’ of the period, the honeysuckle usually symbolized devoted love. Apparently, Rossetti spent a large amount of money to get his Centifolia roses, refreshing his collection regularly with new blossoms, as he painstakingly painted them. The air must have been extremely fragrant, as honeysuckle and Centifolia are both especially noted for their powerful scents, which also adds an invisible dimension of sensual allure to the painting. Venus is a woman of considerable and threatening power.
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.
A Rose a Day. No.2
The White Garden, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, UK.
While the world was falling for new-fangled Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses, some rosarians were less than enamoured of their brazenly modern attributes and the kind of garden aesthetic they encouraged, and in the 1930s the British rose-breeder Edward Bunyard inspired Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson to introduce old roses into her garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.
Of course, taste in gardens is mostly subjective, and Sissinghurst Castle is one of my favorites, perhaps mainly because it’s not so far from where I grew up on the Sussex coast so I’ve visited more than once. The garden is based on the concept of axial walks opening onto enclosed gardens, or "garden rooms". in the Foreword to her Some Flowers (1937) Vita Sackville-West down a challenge which at the time must have stung many British gardeners:
This country is a country of garden-lovers, and it contains many who, getting perhaps a little bored with growing exactly the same things as their neighbours year after year, look round for a few extras which shall come well within the scope of their purse, time, and knowledge. We can all grow wallflowers, lupins, delphiniums or snapdragons. Far be it from me to run down any of these valuable allies, but the moment always comes when the taste of every true flower-lover turns also towards something less usual and obvious.
Sissinghurst’s garden is deliberately crammed to the bursting point with plants, but it never quite collapses into chaos. As I mentioned, old garden roses were central to Sackville-West and Nicolson’s vision, and there is a dedicated area for them. They believed the garden’s setting, beside a medieval castle, as Sackville-West wrote, ‘lent itself kindly to their [roses’] untidy, lavish habit; there was space a plenty, with the walls to frame their exuberance’. The intention was therefore to arrange things so that ‘roses may be found growing in a jungle, sprawling, intertwining, barely tamed and foaming in an unorthodox way’. By 1953, there were almost 200 different old garden roses at Sissinghurst, including ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Complicata’, ‘Camaieux’, ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Belle de Crécy’, ‘Variegata di Bologna’, and ‘Paul Ricault’.
In Some Flowers, Sackville-West discusses 5 roses, all ‘old’: ‘Tuscany’, Rosa moyesii (a native of China that at that time was rare in England), Rosa centifolia nuscosa (the Moss Rose), and Rosa mundi. ‘Tuscany’, a very dark red Gallica Rose, which is also known as the Velvet Rose. Of this rose Sackville-West wrote:
What combination of words! One almost suffocates in their soft depths, as though one sank into a bed of rose-petals, all thorns ideally stripped away. We cannot actually lie on a bed of roses, unless we are decadent and also very rich, but metaphorically we can imagine ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart. This sounds a fanciful way of writing, the sort of way which makes me shut up most gardening books with a bang, but in this case I am trying to get as close to my true meaning as possible. It really does teach one something, to look long and closely at a rose, especially such a rose as Tuscany, which opens flat (being semi-double) thus revealing the quivering and dusty gold of its central perfection.
Sackville-West doesn’t mention Sissinghurst’s most famous feature, the White Garden, in Some Flowers for the simple reason that it wasn’t until the 1950s that she began to plant it into existence. The idea was that only white, green, grey and silver were to grow there. By choosing a pale palette, Sackville-West was uniting flora that usually do not find themselves neighbours, and pride of place is a white species rose, the climberRosa mulliganii. But the rose I remember best at Sissinghurst is the one growing on the south face of the South Cottage, which you can see in the photograph – the Noisette climber ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’ – which, asI later discovered, is the very first rose Sackville-West planted in the garden after she purchased the property. Inspired by this encounter, I planted my own ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’, which today climbs up the east facing wall (it can tolerate shade)of our house in France. We’ve nicknamed it the ‘Curious Rose’, because it is so prolific it keeps reaching high enough to conceal the view out our back window, obliging us to prune it back on a regular basis.