A rose by any other name
When I was a university student in 1959, I learned a number of poems by C. J. Dennis, especially from his series “The Sentimental Bloke” which I would recite on suitable occasions. One I liked was “The Play”. The Bloke (Bill) is trying to impress a new girl Doreen, by taking her to see Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. He recounts the Play:
“Wot’s in a name?—she sez . . . An’ then she sighs,
An’ clasps ‘er little ‘ands, an’ rolls ‘er eyes.
“A rose,” she sez, “be any other name
Would smell the same.
Oh, w’erefore art you Romeo, young sir?
Chuck yer ole pot, an’ change yer moniker!”
Doreen an’ me, we bin to see a show—The swell two-dollar touch. Bong tong, yeh know.
A chair apiece wiv velvit on the seat;
A slap-up treat.
The drarmer’s writ be Shakespeare, years ago,
About a barmy goat called Romeo.”
And so the fun begins.
I think of those lines whenever I walk around our rose garden. We have a garden in two sections with a path in between. The path has a high arbor over it with climbing roses going up almost four metres. At the end is a seat where you can sit and contemplate the garden.
Originally the soil there was terrible. So we dug it all out to a depth of about 25 centimetres. Then I spread the soil to level the lawn about. Into the great hole I lay down drainage pipes and over the pipes, sand and stones. Then we filled both sections with a mixture of good soil, our own humus, rotted grass and shredded paper from the chook recycling bins and covered it all with mulch. Over the years we have added large mounds of mulch every year and a trickle drip watering system on an automated clock.
This hot dry weather (before the rain) brought forth wonderful roses. Even after the rain, we have not been troubled by mildew or black spot (so far!).
Then came Beverley’s much more intelligent part. She chose the roses, mainly with bare rooted stock so that each rose would fit into with the others. The major chain stores often have them for only $6 each, so even good roses need not be expensive. Beverley also takes charge of all pruning.
“A rose,” she sez, “be any other name
Would smell the same.”
But would it? The old fashioned roses such as David Austin varieties can be relied on to have magnificent perfumes. The French dominated the field of growing roses and developing varieties until the First World War.
“Wot’s in a name?—she sez . . . An’ then she sighs,
An’ clasps ‘er little ‘ands, an’ rolls ‘er eyes.
“A rose,” she sez, “be any other name
Would smell the same.
Our Albertine is a strong climber. So we planted it beside the porte cochere I built at the front gate. Cars entering our property drive through and under it, and the flowers in spring hang down in masses. We planted it fifteen years ago and it has not yet reached its maximum cover. We companion planted wisteria so its long flower blooms hang down at a different time of the year. The pink roses are an asset to any home so long as they can climb.
The first rose I ever recall by name was a new one, the very first my widowed mother purchased for the new garden in our new home in 1952. To get a house built in Victoria was quite a miracle so soon after the war with all of shortages of building materials. Only 900 were given building permits in the entire state that year. I helped my mother prepare the garden for the one plant she could afford. It was a yellow rose with pink outer petals. It was raised in France in 1942, sent as bare rooted stock in a diplomatic pouch to USA for raising just as the Nazis invaded France. In 1945, on the very day Berlin fell to the allies, it was released with the name “Peace”. Within seven years, one of them was growing in our front garden, and may still be there to this day.
We chose, like most rose lovers, a Cécile Brunner, named after a French rosier’s two-year-old daughter. (Don’t call it a Cecil Brunner – it’s a girl’s name – Cécile!) Its small pink petals surround a darker pink centre, and the flowers cluster in bunches. In USA, where it was so popular in bridal bouquets, it is called “The Sweetheart Rose.”
Talking about America reminds me of one of its greatest roses, Mr Lincoln. Honest Abe did not like being referred to as “President Lincoln”, so it is simply “Mr Lincoln” released in 1965 to mark the centenary of his assassination. It is one of the most splendid roses, with long stem, and vivid dark red or dark crimson petals. One of our old elders at Wesley Mission used to wax lyrical about his “Mr Lincoln.”
This month, a famous Australian rose lover and gardener turned 100 years of age. Five hundred people gathered in her fabulous rose garden to sing happy birthday. Her garden was designed by probably Australia’s greatest landscape gardener, Edna Walling. The Central Victorian climate suits the roses well. Dame Elizabeth Murdoch has financed a University Department of Landscape Architecture at my old University of Melbourne. When her son Rupert comes to visit, he better be careful in selecting roses for his mother. The rose named after her flowers most of the year, with strong yellow petals tinged with pink.
The town where Beverley and I grew up was famous for its Annual Rose Show. The President of our Horticultural Society was my dentist, Mr Marshall G Tweedie. He also had a rose named after him. Almost every house in our area had roses in the front garden, and many like the house of Misses Perry, had two dozen large standard roses on each side of the front path. Our soil must have been very good, but it was strengthened by the horse manure dropped by the iceman’s and the bread carter’s horses. We would follow with shovel and bucket for mum’s gardens.
During the thirteen years we lived and ministered in Cheltenham Victoria the front of the large church and tower, the office and my study, and the house in which we lived, was fronted by magnificent lawns and a rose garden running along the whole frontage. The lawns had pop-up sprinklers and were always green. About seventy-five Lorraine Lee rose bushes bordered the gardens. Each bush was as high as my head. Every Friday night or Saturday morning, I would remove all the newspapers, bottles and rubbish beneath the roses, then water and weed them.
The Lorraine Lee rose is a year round flower producer with orange/pink/red petals. It is a prolific flower producer and is probably Australia’s most popular rose. Lorraine Lee was a famous English lady who had been a leader of the Women’s Land Army during World War 1. When she visited her cousins in Australia, Mr and Mrs Alister Clark, he had just developed this unusual rose and named it after his visitor.
For twenty-seven years we lived in the Wesley Mission Superintendent’s manse at Roseville – a place famous for it roses. In our front garden were some lovely, very old, strongly perfumed roses planted by Lady Win Walker’s father. We kept and pruned them over the twenty-seven years, and from some of the prunings transplanted the offspring to Tumbi Umbi where they flourish in our rose garden to this day.
While we were living at Roseville, Ron Schepis started courting our daughter. Every visit he made to her he brought her a single rose. We thought this a very romantic touch. For her twenty-first birthday he brought her twenty-one roses. It was only then that we discovered he would always pick the rose on his way down from the railway station from someone’s front garden! And to get twenty-one good roses without being caught was quite an effort!
For decades now at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, many of the outstanding awards for roses have gone to a grower from the lower North Shore. When we would drive our friend Hazel Stenner home to her place at Neutral Bay, we would look at his roses on the way. He grew them to cover every inch of his garden, growing them in his neighbours’ gardens and all along the edge of the road. Every year he would dig out all of the soil, and replace it with truckloads of manure from the Centennial Park Police Horse stables. No wonder his roses were prize winners.
Roses have been named for great leaders like Sir Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and for writers and artists, singers and musicians, saints and sinners.
One famous Australian rose, Mary MacKillop, will really take off if she is named a Roman Catholic saint. Charles Darwin, who was born two hundred years ago in 1809, has a yellow David Austin rose named after him. A few other well-known Australians have roses named after them: Ginger Meggs (red heads of course!), Greg Chappell, Ian Thorpe, Tracey Wickham, and I think, Nancy Ladybird Walton and Cathy Freeman.
And I must mention the one we planted on our side fence, with its blood red flowers, named after the missionary botanist from the China Inland Mission who propagated it while Superintendent of that great Mission, Reverend James Moyes (1876-1930). He discovered many of the greatest roses in China and Tibet which in turn were brought to England for propagation by his friend E.H. Wilson. Today Rosa Moyesii reminds us of his dedication to God, the Gospel and roses.
Beverley and I enjoy our Rose garden. She chooses them, plants them, waters and weeds them, prunes them, sprays them and picks them to give to friends and for our house. I admire them. A rose by any other name would still smell the same? No – the names are different because the appearance and fragrance of each is different.
http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/denniscj/sbloke/play.html
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.