Pink Saturday - December rose

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

For several weeks now, each morning as I walk the dog through my neighborhood, I've been greeted by the amazing scent of a late-blooming rose that grows at the front gate of someone's property.

It's a large shrub, growing in a rock-walled bank of earth raised up from the street. It faces southeast, and has its back to a fence - this probably gives it a warm and protected microclimate. Its flowers are bright pink, or cerise, and are semi-double. Their shape is somewhat informal, blowsy.

Its scent is so strong you smell it from twenty feet away.

Because roses are so valuable in every human culture where they are cultivated, and because it is relatively easy to propagate them, roses have gone along as passengers in most human journeys. Rose cuttings traveled from the Middle East through the Ottoman Empire and into Bulgaria. They traveled from Spain to Mexico. They traveled from the gardens of Tudor England to Virginia, Delaware and Georgia. They traveled from France to India.

Here in the U.S., roses from Eastern gardens traveled with pioneers settling the west. Women in Conestoga wagons broke a spray from their mother's rosebush and took a rooted cutting along with them as they cross the American continent.

Roses are long-lived, and often a rosebush will endure longer than the house in whose dooryard it was planted. This one looks as if it's been there since the little bungalow nearby was planted, probably in the '20s or '30s.

Some people just enjoy flowers, no matter what they're called. Other people - myself included - are afflicted with a peculiar obsession. We have to know this particular flower's name.

Rosarians look at each aspect of a plant to determine what type of rose it is.


In addition to the color and shape of its flowers, there are other important clues. Are the flowers carried together in clusters, or do they bloom alone at the end of the stem?

How are the flowers' sepals shaped? These are long and straight, unlike the fringed and fuzzy sepals of the European gallica roses.

What are its leaves like? They can be rounded or slender, glossy or wrinkly, grey-green or bright. What about the thorns - is it wickedly armed, or does it have few, if any, barbs? This plant has rounded, matte leaves, and is sparsely thorned.

What is its bloom habit? This rose doesn't bloom year-round like a modern Hybrid Tea rose, but rather it blooms in one big flush in the spring, and then once again in the fall. This blooming habit is an important clue to its identity.

Old Garden Roses - the ones grown in Europe - bloomed only once a year. This was a disappointment for gardeners, so during the Crusades, they were thrilled to discover a rose in the Middle East that bloomed again in the fall. This was the Damask Rose - rosa x damascena semperflorens, named after Damascus in Syria. It was also extremely fragrant.

Northern gardeners bred them with European roses to create roses with a longer bloom season that could still take the cold.

A few centuries later, travelers from Asia returned with specimens of roses with a much longer bloom season. These China Roses and Tea Roses also brought new colors to the European roses - yellow and orange and true red. They were bred into the mix, and by the 19th century, hybridizers crossed and re-crossed different roses to create a marketed commodity for a rising middle class - and the qualities they valued included a variety of colors, summer-long bloom, hardiness against the cold, and the ability to produce lots of large lush flowers for cutting.

What kind of rose is this? I've looked in all my books and looked online, and I wonder if it is one of the family of roses called Portland roses, which originated around 1800. The English Duchess of Portland obtained a rose from Italy called "paestana", probably a Damask and China cross. The Duchess, in a show of international goodwill in spite of the conflicts between their nations, sent a plant to Empress Josephine at her garden Malmaison in France. The Empress's gardener named the rose after the Duchess, and developed other repeat-blooming roses from it.

These roses were the ancestors of the beautiful Bourbon and Hybrid Perpetual roses of the 19th century - but Portland roses are still prized by gardeners on their own merits.

Is it possible that this rose, or one of its descendants, traveled all the way from Empress Josephine's garden to Topanga, California? Are there any rosarians out there who'd like to take a crack at this mystery?