English Roses Classic Favorites & New Selections

The rose in its numerous forms has many talents - although no group of roses has all of them. The Old Roses have beauty, charm, fragrance and pleasing, shrubby growth. The Modern Roses have a wide range of colour and the ability to flower throughout the summer. My aim has been, insofar as is possible, to combine all these virtues in one group of roses and, indeed, in one rose. Every plant breeder has to have a clear idea of what he wants to achieve for his chosen flower. The first question I had to ask myself was: 'What should this be?' The second was: 'How can I achieve it?' I consider practical points, such as disease-resistance, freedom of flower and hardiness, to be as important in the development of English Roses as aesthetic factors, which may include broadening the range of flower colour, bringing in greater fragrance and so on. There is, however, one goal that I believe to be more important than all the others. This is, quite simply, that we should strive to develop the rose's beauty in flower, growth and leaf. This might seem an obvious objective, for do not all flower breeders have this aim in view? They may search for brighter and more intense colours; they might try to produce a larger flower and all manner of other measurable characteristics - but not many of them search for anything so abstract and elusive as the simple beauty of the flower and its growth which, of course, in the gardener's eyes, is the only reason for growing it. It seems to be assumed that all plants are beautiful whatever we do to them, and there is a certain truth in this. But it is quite possible, indeed almost usual, for the plant breeder to reduce this beauty while improving the more practical aspects of the plant. We need only look back down the ages to when man first started to adapt plants to his wishes, to see that in the end he nearly always degrades the very thing he loves. Nature, left to her own devices, finds it hard to produce anything that is ugly. But the garden rose is not by any means entirely a product of nature. The hand of man has played a decisive part. The same is true of other highly developed flowers: dahlias, chrysanthemums, rhododendrons, daffodils, irises, lilies and peonies, to name but a few. In many cases, the work of the plant breeders has been beneficial and the subject has been enhanced as a garden plant. In many other instances, the effect has been damaging. We have only to walk around the average garden centre to see how true this is: giant, over-sized polyanthus and pansies, two plants that once had simple charm and beauty - and what have we done to them? The result has been that many discerning gardeners (with somewhat highbrow inclinations) have preferred to confine their planting to flowers of nature, or at least to close relatives of species plants. I think this is a shame: the 'garden' flower can be developed to have its own kind of beauty, different from that of the simple child of nature. The garden is not the 'wild'; it is a man-made creation and should, with certain exceptions, be treated as such. The garden requires bolder statements than we would find in the wild. With the above principles in mind, I describe below the various wishes I have for the English Roses, taking one aspect at a time, but always remembering that the breeder's skill is to capture the beauty of a rose at all stages. The crowning glory of the rose - its fragrance - is a characteristic I regard as being so important that I give it a separate chapter. The Form of the Flower The form of the flower is, perhaps, the most important feature in defining the rose's beauty and is also the aspect that differentiates more than any other the English Roses from other contemporary roses. A quirk of nature allows the doubling up of petals in garden roses. What happens is this: the stamens of the flowerAustin, David is the author of 'English Roses Classic Favorites & New Selections' with ISBN 9780881927535 and ISBN 0881927538.