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.
The spring of the moot
It was very clear
a strange shallow stream
dark green weed streaming in the current
