Coming up roses
BY LYNDA PAPESCH
Colourful climbers: Climbing roses look fabulous trained over arches, pergolas and other structures. This one is at Hortensia House in O’Dwyers Rd
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Roses are still a firm favourite in the flower stakes.
An ancient symbol of love and beauty, the rose is just as highly treasured today as it was millennia ago by ancient civilisations. Sacred to several goddesses such as Isis, Aphrodite and Venus and also used as a symbol of the Virgin Mary, roses date back to well before the birth of Christ. Rose means pink or red in a variety of languages, including Greek and Polish.
Modern rose culture bloomed during the 1800s with the introduction into Europe of perpetual blooming roses from China. Those early perpetual blooms form the basis of the varieties available today and there are literally thousands to choose from.
A perennial flower shrub or vine of the genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae, there are more than 100 species, thousands of hybrids and a huge array of colours with more being bred every year. Most roses are native to Asia although a few originated in Europe, North America, and northwest Africa.
Mostly grown for its flowers, the rose has a variety of other uses such as rosewater made from the rose oil, perfumes, and rose hips in jams, jellies and even teas.
Roses are one of the most liked flowering shrubs and are also grown commercially for cut flowers. Generally they fall into one of three main groups – wild, old garden, and modern garden roses – but the bulk of those grown today are modern varieties, albeit species which trace their parentage back to old garden roses.
Rose breeders were quick to pick up on creating hybrids, to develop roses that bloomed with profusion and scent. In 1909, the first polyantha/hybrid tea cross, `Gruss an Aachen', was created, with characteristics midway between both parent classes. As the larger, more shapely flowers and hybrid-tea like growth habit separated these new roses from polyanthas and hybrid teas alike, a new class was created and named Floribunda, Latin for "many-flowering." Typical floribundas feature stiff shrubs, smaller and bushier than the average hybrid tea but less dense and sprawling than the average polyantha.
The flowers are often smaller than hybrid teas but are carried in large sprays, giving a better floral effect in the garden. Floribundas are found in all hybrid tea colours and with the classic hybrid tea-shaped blossom, sometimes differing from hybrid teas only in their cluster-flowering habit.
Grandifloras (Latin for ''large-flowered'') were the class of roses created in the mid 1900s to designate back-crosses between hybrid teas and floribundas that fit neither category specifically, the Queen Elizabeth rose, which was introduced in 1954. Grandiflora shrubs are typically larger than either hybrid teas or floribundas, and feature hybrid tea-style flowers borne in small clusters of three to five, similar to a floribunda. Grandifloras maintained some popularity from about the 1950s to the 1980s but today they are much less popular than either the hybrid teas or the floribundas.
Miniature, climbing and rambling roses all developed along similar lines with hybridisation created a raft of colours to match the hybrid tea and floribunda versions.
A modern category is landscape roses which were developed mainly for mass amenity planting. Collectively known as shrub roses, they include flower carpet roses, which were first introduced in 1990.
- The Marlborough Express
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