Treasure Trove
Guest post by Peter
This is a by-blow of Kiftsgate+, one of those roses that lack the gene that tells them when to stop growing. I first saw Kiftsgate in the eponymous garden forty-odd years ago, where it was covering three full-grown cedar trees. We went straight on from there to Treasure’s nursery, and spotting Treasure Trove on offer I bought it on the strength of the label. I planted it down by the pond at the bottom of the garden of our old house, hoping it would eventually scramble up into some large old yew trees. It took a few years to get going, but on a tip from a TV programme about Paul’s Himalayan Musk++ – another of those roses that lack the gene – I started giving it a barrow-load of manure each winter spread in a wide circle around its base. By the time Robin showed up it was well up into the yews, and also into the three full grown birch trees standing close beside the (small) pond that composed the Two Acres.*
We used to open the garden for charity+++ three or four times a year, timing the first opening to coincide with Treasure Trove in full flush, when if all went well she** would be lowering her long trailing stems of several hundred small roses each, opening pale apricot and fading to white, towards the water. Three weeks of that and she was over for the year, but during that time the garden would have been worth visiting for that brief burst of glory alone.
My garden here isn’t as elfin as Robin’s, but I think you could fit about sixty of it into our old garden. One yew tree would have taken up a good third of it. So it was pretty dotty of me to pick up Treasure Trove at the first rose nursery we visited after the move. But ha! Just over the wall behind my shed, in a corner of the rough paddock where a neighbour keeps a few horses, was a small stand of some of those coarse nondescript trees one can never bother to learn the name of. They could do with something to brighten them up, if only for three weeks of the year. There was a scruffy little bed my side of the wall with nothing but bluebells*** in it and a variegated ivy in the corner.
I widened it a bit, dug it out as deep as I could, chucking out any bluebell bulbs I found, filled it up with good rich earth, and popped Treasure Trove in, not expecting her to do much that year. “Grow, you bastard,” I said, a charm I learnt from my saintly mother. It worked, and by the end of the growing season she’d reached the top of the wall, all set to stride up into the trees come spring.
Winter came, with storms. I was woken one night by a frenzied banging coming from immediately above my head. My house was once part of the stables of a Georgian mansion, and I sleep in what used be a section of the hayloft, with the ceiling sloping down on two sides to within four feet of the floor. The bit immediately above my head sloped like that, with the roof-slates close above it, and the banging was caused by the branches of a tree just behind my house threshing around in the gales and thwacking the slates. Not good for either slates or slumber.
I called my neighbour next morning and asked her to have the tree pruned, and was relieved a couple of days later to hear the sound of a chain saw. Too late I discovered that she’d solved the problem by having the whole grove felled, with the result that Treasure Trove had no fresh world to conquer and was forced to colonise the top of the wall, the shed, and the façade of the house. Not much daylight seeps through into the kitchen just now.
All is not lost. The trees are of a type that responds well to coppicing, and the new shoots already rise six foot above the wall. This winter I shall endeavour to persuade Treasure Trove to turn her attentions to them, and negotiate with my neighbour to leave a few trees standing next time.
* * *
+ http://www.kiftsgate.co.uk/kiftsgaterose.shtml I find this an immensely frustrating site. Home is here: http://www.kiftsgate.co.uk/index.shtml But you’d never know that this is one of the most fabulous gardens in England. For pity’s sake give us some decent photos. Make us yearn to go there, aside from wanting to gape at the original Kiftsgate the way zoo visitors hang around the big cat pens.
++ I put in both Kiftsgate and Paul’s Himalayan Musk later on. Ahem.
* “All gardens, no matter how small, should have at least two acres of woodland.” Lionel de Rothschild. ^
^ Dear Lionel was known for having the common touch. How big a pot do I need for two acres?
** I think the feminine is house style for roses on this blog
*** A miracle in the woods, a pestilentially invasive thug in gardens.^
^ The problem is they’re endangered. Every time you hoick out another bucketful from your garden—I do this too—you should take them out to the woods somewhere salubrious, and plant the suckers. But I guarantee that would be the day that the Plant Police were patrolling in that area and you’d get arrested for stealing them. No, really: it’s illegal to do anything to a wildflower in England but admire it. And things can get pretty hot about something like bluebells, for which there’s a thriving black market. Hey, if I saw someone in the woods on his/her knees with a trowel and a bucket of bluebells I might hit ’em with a hellhound first and ask questions later.
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