The English Roses

Beloved for their beautiful pastel colors and their appealing fragrance, often enhanced by the hotter and more reliable summers of the U.S., English roses have been garden favorites for years. When he originated English roses, David Austin sought to combine the desirable flower forms and fragrance of old roses with the wide color range and repeat flowering of modern hybrids. To the delight of gardeners across the world, he was successful. Now, in his first book in more than ten years, Austin introduces 40 recently developed varieties in addition to 40 of his best-loved and time-tested favorites. Beautiful photographic portraits of each are complimented by notes on attributes, history, and special requirements for growing in the garden. Ideal for rose enthusiasts and gardeners.

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 flower mutate into petals over many years so that eventually, by means of selection, we have a 'double-flowered' rose. The wild species roses are undoubtedly beautiful, but it is the multiplication of their petals that has made possible the great wealth of beauty we now find in garden roses. It is by the reflection of the light between the petals and through the petals — and the many effects thereby produced — that all the beauty of the garden rose becomes possible. There are, in fact, no double roses in nature.

No variety of English Rose fits exactly into any one form but there are six basic shapes, with endless gradations, which come from the Old Roses, and a seventh which has the bud shape of Hybrid Teas.

Single Flowers

The rose is naturally single-flowered. In this form it charms us with its simplicity, delicacy and apparent frailty — to which must be added the airy beauty of its yellow, gold or red stamens. The beauty of the single rose, more than any other, depends upon the manner in which the flowers are poised upon the stem. Its growth should not be too heavy but light, open and graceful. We have only a few single-flowered English Roses: in fact, rather surprisingly, they are not the easiest to breed — perhaps because the garden rose has been double for too many generations; also, we have not many single varieties to breed from. Examples of single-flowered English Roses include 'Ann' — with particularly daintily poised flowers — and 'The Alexandra Rose' which forms a large, spreading shrub with typical wild-rose flowers. Single roses are generally not so fragrant as double roses, because they have fewer petals to make the fragrance. We have a number of very beautiful single-flowered English Roses in our trial grounds.

Semi-Double Flowers

It is only a small step from the single to the semi-double flower: add a few petals and we have a rose which will last longer but is, in many ways, similar. Semi-double roses retain much of the light, dainty effect of a single rose and usually have attractive stamens. The flowers vary considerably: they may be cup-shaped or flat, formal or more loosely petalled; they may be produced in sprays of many flowers or few. They offer quite a large variety of rose beauty. Examples are 'Windflower', 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Cordelia'.

The Rosette-Shaped Flower

The rosette-shaped flower could be described as the quintessential English Rose. The rosette is also the main flower shape of the Old Roses. It is the intertwining of the petals that offers us the opportunity of a great variety of beauty. Such flowers may be either loosely or closely packed with petals. Where there are fewer petals, it may be possible to detect just a few stamens. In some varieties the centre petals of the flower may be clustered together in the form of a button. Again, the petals may be incurved or flat — or they may reflex at the edges. In fact, a great variety of forms and effects become possible, so that it is almost impossible to find two flowers, between one variety and another that are the same.

Varieties of English Rose with rosette-shaped flowers are too numerous to list in full but include 'Eglantyne', 'Mary Rose', 'Teasing Georgia' and 'The Countryman'.

The Deep Cup

Perhaps the most impressive flowers are those that are deeply cupped. These may be filled with petals, as in 'Brother Cadfael', or they may be, to a greater or lesser degree, open and goblet-like, as in 'Golden Celebration'. With the open-cupped flower, it is particularly pleasing to peer inside and see the intertwining petals — and perhaps sniff the flower's rich perfume.

Not many cup-shaped English Roses are completely open: often there are a few petals just hiding the stamens and in the full cup there are no stamens to be seen at all. Cup-shaped English Roses include some very large flowers that we might expect to be clumsy, but this is seldom the case. On a sufficiently...