Old roses and Graham Stuart Thomas
It’s been well over a month since Penelope and I went to Mottisfont Abbey. Just in case you’ve forgotten:
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-mottisfont/
. . . I’ve been wasting time trying to find more photos of the roses at Mottisfont Abbey, for pity’s sake. It’s the National Collection of Old Roses, and abbeys and Rex Whistler and stable blocks and rivers and things are all very well but what about the roses? If I’m not careful I’m going to put Hang an Album of Photos of Mottisfont Roses on my to-do list, and like my to-do list needs more items.
But several people asked me at the time I posted about Mottisfont to say more about old roses. And I’m not good at being crisp and informative. (You may have noticed.) So here’s something that does a good job of the essential rundown:
http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/Advanced.asp?PageId=1997
This is the more romantic version:
http://www.classicroses.co.uk/articles/rose_history/rose_history.html
These guys are a find, even if they’re still in 2007:
http://www.rkdn.org/roses/History.asp
http://www.rkdn.org/roses/oldroses.asp
And anyone here in the
http://www.historicroses.org/index.php?s=history
But there are a lot of good roses and old-roses sites out there. Mmmmmm. . . . Like chocolate, only without the calories. Or possibly like chocolate for your garden, in the bursting-at-the-seams sense.*
But I also wanted to say something about Graham Stuart Thomas, who is or anyway was sort of the mage of mages of old roses, the super-guru, the supreme maven. He more or less single-handedly kept both the roses themselves and the idea of growing old roses alive through the era when no one thought they were worth the garden space, and he also designed Mottisfont’s rose garden, filled it with the roses he’d personally saved from final destruction, and made it the old roses national collection, which by the time he finished it was a highly desirable thing, and not the expensive folly of a crank.
This is the best of the obits I can find on line.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/may/02/guardianobituaries2
And it does cover the ground. The ones in the Historic Roses Group and the Royal National Rose Society’s journals are much livelier and more personal . . . but I still don’t know what ‘fair use’ consists of, so I’ll decline to type either of them in.
I was/am myself a fan, and I have The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book which is the anthology of his three classic books on old roses, and I use it all the time.** (One of these days I’ll post an annotated list of Favourite Rose Books.) But while he is generally revered, there are abstainers:
http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/books_reviews/graham_stuart_thomas
I don’t know this book. I’m not too interested in the memoirs behind practical hands-on stuff like gardening—and I wouldn’t have any patience with Lady Thing and Lord Doodad either—and yes Thomas was all about historical conservation and very little about radical change. Maybe I haven’t seen enough National Trust gardens, or maybe I’m just an easily smitten American***, but I like all those old fashioned gardens, and there are a lot of modern ones I find new for the sake of newness, and absurd or ugly (or both). And that he expected garden staff to call him ‘Mr Thomas’? Please. He recently died at 94. It’s his era.
This is more the tone I’m used to:
http://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/index.php?art_id=383
And note it’s a review of the same book.
But I think Thomas himself should have the last word. Here’s what he says about my darling Mme Isaac Pereire:
‘Possibly the most powerfully fragrant of all roses; the flowers are enormous, of intense rose-madder, shaded magenta, bulging with rolled petals, quartered, and opening to a great saucer-face. Big, bold foliage on a fine big bush up to
Tomorrow I’ll post some rose photos. Unless I get distracted, of course.
* * *
* Which would make it/them a bad case of cholera for the wallet.
** It is also an extremely pretty book, and very pleasing to hold and read. Badly designed gardening books are positively painful, like nettle rash, and a badly designed rose book is a felony.
*** About traditional English country gardens? Guilty with knobs on.
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I’ll have to read all the text in those links when I’m a little less sleepy (need coffee!), but mmm, those rose pictures. And the gardens. Even just pictures, they make me feel so peaceful.
And in that second link, I think, I love the Moss Rose with the sparkles, and Bourbon Rose just underneath it. Wow, those are beautiful.
Good. :) (You are keeping Weird Hours lately.)
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Good. :) (You are keeping Weird Hours lately.)
This is the second week of night shift. Usually I manage to get up for a few hours during the day and pretend to be normal, but so far this week (is it only Tuesday? I think tonight is our Wednesday) I’ve been sleeping away the sunlight. Any color my skin might have picked up from moving trees around the yard is now *gone*.
Next week is evenings – 3pm – 11pm. Much closer to my natural awake time. :)
Pale is interesting. :) And it sure beats sunburn.
Random question–
I was reading a Lloyd Alexander book this morning,[Castle of Llyr] and I noticed, for the first time, that Princess Eilonwy is referred to as “Eilonwy, daughter of Angharad, daughter of Regat, Princess of Llyr”. That’s like the first sentence of the book, but it only just hit me … ANGHARAD!
So I thought to myself “Must ask Robin tonight on blog if this is just a very odd coincidence”.
And just now, I googled “lloyd alexander angharad” as search terms and came up with this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angharad
Hmmm. Somehow I had always thought you made up the name Angharad, but I guess not! Still, you are listed there, as the wonderful Harimad is mentioned!
:)
So I am not quite sure WHAT I am asking now, but I am asking SOMETHING. [more brain exericse, I suppose, compliments of Julia, eh?!] About the origin of name Angharad, and any connection to Lloyd Alexander perhaps?
–Julia
No, afraid not. But it’s a Welsh name I had always found tremendously romantic–before I ever read Alexander (whom I discovered late).
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If you had read Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisangamen 1500 times as a child (oh, alright , this is an arbitrary requirement and you didn’t really have to), you would remember that Angharad Goldenhand was a mythical Welsh semi-supernatural lady (personifying the fruitfulness of summer or such.) But really, go and read it, and the Moon of Gomrath was even better, to my taste. He’s much, much better than Lloyd Alexander. And the Owl Service. And Elidor. Must go and thrust them into the hands of the 8-year old daughter (well maybe not the Owl Service quite yet, it’s more YA, having much ado about Relationships)
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Yes, I agree with you again–although I discovered Garner late also. (And Alexander was a lovely human being and Garner . . . um . . . ) Angharad is just one of those names–I think you just *know* that it’s magical.
Well, and Garner’s later work got very odd and inaccessible. But the early stuff was smashing.
Well, and Garner’s later work got very odd and inaccessible.
********* Yes, I’m afraid I agree with you there too.
But the early stuff was smashing.
********* Yes, extremely. A lot of it ahead of its time too.
Another comment unrelated to post [but sort of related to last comment]
LOOK WHAT I FOUND!
I just sat and watched all three parts. And thought people might like to see it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jln9VPoP3Tw&feature=related
It’s Lloyd Alexander!
That’s all for now.
Goodnight!
–Julia
Lloyd Alexander was a wonderful human being. And he was *tremendously* nice to me when I was a baby author just starting out.
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What a lovely link – thank you, Julia!
I grew up reading Lloyd Alexander and I adored his books – still do! There’s something very loveable and charming about them, and there is no difficulty understanding where that came from. Watching the videos made me feel so happy/sad.
I’d seen an interview with him before – he came to a school near mine (in Sweden!), which felt very unlucky but they videotaped it and we got to watch it too. I must have been 12-13, so it probably was around 1984 or something like that (I wonder if I wrote about it in my diary?), and I remember how utterly lost I was in watching it – perhaps it was as well he didn’t come to our school – I might have been so awe-struck I might not have paid much attention to what he said! (Complete sour-grapism, of course!)
I’ve actually read the book about his cats that he mentions (“My Five Tigers”) and it opened my eyes to the wonderfulness of cats (I already loved animals in general – it made me love cats in particular) and the Westmark trilogy opened my eyes to the cruelty and waste of war. All the hours of enjoyment reading and re-reading his books! One summer-day in my grandmother’s summercottage in Finland I actually read “The Cat Who Wished to be a Man” to my at that time book-hating younger brothers!
I thought you would like what he said about being [or NOT being] a “children’s book author” and the process of writing for children [or NOT doing that], as it sort of ties in with your thing about labels and [your]books being labeled/categorized as something they aren’t and so on.
I’m not sure if it is a result of that [of YOU] or not, but lately, at the
library, I have taken to saying that “a good book is a good book, no matter how old you are”- [not necessarily the reverse, that a child of seven might not be the best person to hand an adult book [can't think of a good example at the moment, but you get what I am saying]… but I have no compunction whatsoever at leading an older child back over to the J [Juvenile Fiction] section, as well as making recommendations in YA. No one is too old to read or reread a good book. [I know, I know, I am preaching to the choir here. Just saying.]
:)
–Julia
Well, the choir likes to hear it occasionally. :) And yes, barring vocabulary and the suitability of certain subjects, a good book is a good book. Full stop.
They are gorgeous. Sadly it’s hard to grow them in Florida. I don’t know how they act in England but they are water and fertilizer hogs here. And they’re very susceptible to nematodes and blackspot. Generally speaking, they have to be grown off Fortuniana rootstock to do well in Florida. I do manage to grow some roses in my yard though- right now I have about 8. I love the “smelly’ ones the best: Angel Face and Mr. Lincoln and Scentsational and so on. I mostly have more modern roses because the older roses with lots of petals don’t tend to do well in the heat and humidity. Gardening is definitely different here than in England or New England. I miss the lilacs from my native Connecticut. But on the bright side, I can grow orchids outside year round.
they are water and fertilizer hogs here.
******* Well, pretty much anything that flowers as lavishly as roses are this, although I know it does vary. I know people grow roses in Florida, I think most of them just resign themselves to a short early season.
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Lovely! Thank you for the links. What amazing pictures. I like the one for David Austin Roses because now some of the flowers you’ve talked about have faces. :)
I own a Leander, but I live in an apartment with a balcony and no yard and frequent heavy fogs, so my rose lives in a planter with my mom. *sads* (Er, that is, it lives at my mom’s house, in a planter. My mother is not a plant!)
Well, you mom might LIVE in a planter. :) If your balcony can hold the weight, you can wedge quite a few pots of roses in. If you feed them well they do fine in pots. As I’m discovering however you really have to be *on top of* what goes in the pots. Not just food and healthy soil but the right balance.
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****and made it the old roses national collection, which by the time he finished it was a highly desirable thing****
A person can’t ask for a better monument.
And your Mme. Isaac Pereire–September blooming? She goes very late, doesn’t she? These are beautiful plants, but not, alas, for Minnesota unless global warming really kicks in.
You asked about the puppy a few posts ago–I just found that comment as our DSL went on hiatus yesterday. Yes, we are bringing him home in about a week and a half. Our big local show weekend is this weekend; the Alpha Bitch is entered for three days, and I am show chairperson for our group club’s show next Monday. On Tuesday I will cart the Alpha Bitch to her handlers’. On Wednesday we head east to fetch the boy. I would never put a puppy on a plane by choice, so we are driving out. We are still thinking about names. I’ve decided on a registered name but you have to be careful about the associations of a call name, and we are still mulling it over. Although sometimes you get lucky and have it handed to you–Zinka, the Tripod’s mother, was named for Zinka Milanov because the night I heard about her birth (her mother was ours, but was being whelped by her co-owner), I heard Zinka M. and Jussi Bjoerling sing the tomb scene from Aida, and it brought the hairs up on the back of my neck. (And my Zinka was a diva, too. A person can get very superstitious about names.)
Yes, whenever I get around to posting those rose photos that were supposed to go up tonight, they will include some Roses as Big as Your Head of Mme Isaac. If Sunshine grew roses . . . :)
I SO agree with you about names. (I wondered about Zinka, since Milanov is the only one I know. And Bjoerling is one of my favourites. AND the tomb scene from Aida is one of my favourites.) Let us know please?
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Thank you for those links, very interesting.
We went to see one of our nicer local gardens last weekend: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55324816@N00/sets/72157606837768201/
It’s the sort of place that gives a feeling of being in ‘Grantchester’. :).
Yes, very nice. Also familiar. I think I must have been there. :) Obviously worth a revisit. Some day when hellhounds are leave-able.
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Yes, G S Thomas was of his era. This didn’t stop me getting mightily irritated with him when I bought a couple of his post-rose period books on perennial gardens and found it was full of raising things in some nursery beds in one’s vast acreage, directing the executional garden staff to plant them at appropriate locations for the 2 months they looked good, and then replacing them as the season progressed.
Please!!!
Apart from the minor details of not having vast acreage of nursery beds or an executional garden staff, I consider that approach to be CHEATING! And unkind to the poor discarded plants, wasteful, disrespectful of their plantness, etc…. So I wrote him off as a pompous old dodderer (who was disrespecting roses by that time in favor of cannas and such).
Yes, my garden is full of plants which have not done anything good-looking for years, but I keep hoping.
Hmm. I’ve always found his stuff very useful. I think you’re confusing him with Christopher Lloyd, who’s the one who packed in roses for cannas.
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Doh! Profuse apologies to Mr Thomas, it WAS Christopher LLoyd!
Oh good. Thomas *died* the Old Roses Master, he never gave them up. But Lloyd . . . well, Pollyanna or no Pollyanna, I agree with you about him, although I liked some of his early books, before he’d gotten too pleased with himself as a ‘character’. When he tore all the roses out at Great Dixter that was just the last straw–he’d already lost me.
Robin Chotizinoff wrote a very good gardening memoir/expose of freaky gardeners. “People With Dirty Hands”. Very good quirky, and I think you’d like it. She also has a blog, about half about gardening. Hope this isn’t redundant. I’m crazy rushed, don’t know why I’m posting this, but I think its a cry for help. Anyway, have a good day. Also, why do I put things off till the last minute, and does everyone do this? Is it part of the human condition? Also, thank you for writing about roses intelligently. There is so much misinformation out there! You rock.
Yes, I read Dirty Hands . . . oh, years ago. I’ll have to look for her blog.
but I think its a cry for help.
******** What? Huh?
Anyway, have a good day. Also, why do I put things off till the last minute, and does everyone do this?
******** I was going to say ‘yes’ and then I thought of all those well organised people who would write in indignantly. A LOT of us do this, let’s say.
Is it part of the human condition?
******** It is for those of us with more life than time. You–well, I–choose a few things to get done on time and the rest, well . . .
Also, thank you for writing about roses intelligently.
******* You’re welcome! :)
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I meant me not getting stuff done was a cry for help, but tongue in cheek, not seriously. I think the other Robin’s blog is just a blog. Sorry, last minute home repair late night no sleep hurry, hurry, people coming rambling why am I on line issues.
This hit me last night while I was trying to go to sleep: the UK equivalent of the fair use copyright doctrine is fair dealing, and since that’s where your Internet Service Provider (the nice people who connect you to the internet) is, I believe those are the copyright rules under which the blog would fall, even though robinmckinleysblog.com is registered in the US. I think you’re fine under the “fair dealing in a work with acknowledgment for the purposes of criticism or review” bit here, unless the blog could be considered a commercial venture, which it might be since it is partly a publicity tool. Copyright laws tend to lag way behind technological innovation, however, and obviously when the CDPA was implemented no one had any inkling about blogs, so it’s probably a gray area unless there is pertinent case law.
I suppose an obit counts as ‘review’?! The point being that I wanted to talk about Thomas . . . if anything I’d be ‘advertising’ him because the REASON I want to talk about him is because he knows a lot about roses and his books on same are worthwhile. Yes, blogs . . . I had no IDEA that NOT everyone was doing blogs when I agreed to join the show a year ago. I thought all this kind of thing had already been SORTED. :)
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…the UK equivalent … and since that’s where your Internet Service Provider (the nice people who connect you to the internet) is, I believe those are the copyright rules under which the blog would fall, even though robinmckinleysblog.com is registered in the US.
Well, possibly. There are complicated jurisdictional things about the Internet – for example, there’s an important defamation case called Gutnick, which provided that the plaintiff could sue in the jurisdiction where he lived, not where the website was hosted or registered.
In any case, is it the quote that we’re concerned about? I’d agree about the critcism and review of Thomas’ work, and might be inclined to look at the overlap with news reporting.
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What I was originally talking about was wanting to type in–since there didn’t seem to be links to–the obits for Thomas that the Royal National Rose Society and the Historical Roses Group published in their (paper) journals. If I wanted to pursue this I’d start by asking each if I could have permission. These are not great corporate entities; they might just say yes.
First of all, I know nothing about the subject, Graham Stuart Thomas, the book or the reviewers – but I read both the reviews and I would certainly be inclined to believe the second.
The first seemed not only negative, which is fine – but also ill natured, which is not. Clearly the reviewer set out with the intention of seeking fault; and while it is true that just because somebody has done wonderful things does not necessarily mean that he was a loveable person, I would not take this reviewers word for it that Graham Stuart Thomas was a fawning stuck-up snob. As for the lords and ladies so resented by the reviewer, they might possibly – a totally wild guess – have something to do with, you know, GARDENING?! And as for the Mr Thomas, as you so justly observe, that was his era; what else, pray, would they call him? (I keep getting this – admittedly silly – vision of a pimply-faced teenager going “Yo, Graham!”) What else would people in equivalent positions in other fields have been called? (Mr/Mrs/Miss/Doctor/Professor…) Also, about his book being dull — well, being a great gardener doesn’t make one a riveting raconteur, surely, and I suppose he thought his book would be read by people interested in his recollections rather than his writing-style. And if the excerpt you provided from one of his books is any example, I would actually doubt the dullness, too; I found his prose perfectly pleasant and enjoyable.
All in all, it felt biassed, petty and unfair; and particularly unfairness – er – annoys me…:)
But what a lovely word – rosarian – I don’t think I’ve seen it before…
Yes, rosarian is nice, isn’t it? :)
thanks for saying ‘ill natured’. That was my feeling too–that whoever this person was, he/she went in with axes already grinding. And anyone with a focus can be accused of not looking outside of it. there is a point there–which is why I posted the review link–and Thomas more often tends to attract fawning himself–BUT. He was also extremely generous on his own old-fashioned terms.
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Speaking of wonderful rose gardens, if anyone is flying through Gatwick and has 3 hours with nothing to do, Nyman’s garden is 10 miles down the road and it’s wonderful. Wrong side of London for you, Robin, but so, so good (or it was 7 years ago). Lots of old roses and climbers and such.
Nymans is **gorgeous.** Of course I’ve been there. :) That was before the hellhounds, of course.
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