by Joe Eck
Few of those crosses would actually be of great interest here, for most would fit into the ever-blurring classes of hybrid teas and floribundas, the roses most people imagine when roses are mentioned, the staples of the florist’s trade for holidays, for reconciliations and all other romantic occasions, for proms and funerals. We might grow them if we could grow them well, for a flourishing old tea rose, well pruned to a height of perhaps five feet, thick of cane with healthy, glossy, burgundy-tinted leaves, and rich with buds and flowers—a ‘Mister Lincoln’, perhaps, a ‘Queen Elizabeth’, or a ‘Peace’—has to be admired. And when we see one, we do, and there is an undeniable tug at the heart. But we do not live where such things are possible, in California or Texas or the middle South. We live in Vermont, and we are realistic about that. Somewhat, anyway. For we confess that in our early days here we grew those three and others in pots, as we had seen done in Roman courtyards, and we even once buried our plants in trenches in the vegetable garden, only to find, come spring, that we had given a fine winter’s sustenance to whole families of mice. We have never believed that going to a great deal of trouble was any argument against growing a wonderful plant. Quite the reverse. But the effort does have to pay dividends. And all our experiments with tea and floribunda roses have ended in few. Or none.
Fortunately, however, the world of roses is so vast and varied that we have never lacked for them, and each year we add a few more. They are all shrub roses, either antique or modern hybrids. The antiques are chiefly in the four important groups designated as alba, gallica, centifolia, or rugosa, once thought to be species though now considered to be complex crosses themselves. For example, we have grown the tall, vigorous, and quite hardy rose called ‘Tour de Malakoff’ almost from the beginning of our garden here. It was bred in 1856 and has been popular ever since because of its good health and its rich, smoky deep purple flowers. And it has always been classed as a centifolia, though modern analysis has indicated that it possesses genetic material of Rosa gallica, R. moschata, R. canina, and R. ×damascena. Modern shrub roses may also be a complex blend of almost anything, though they are apt to have a strong tincture of American native species in them, particularly carolina, or the sturdiest and most cold-resistant Asian species, such as rugosa and multiflora, to guarantee their hardiness. But fuzzy as the genetics are, all the ones we grow here are within the classifications of antique and modern shrub roses. There are perhaps a hundred, though we have not counted. If there are that many, we do know there will be a hundred and five, come spring. For that is what we have ordered this year.
Of course, with very few exceptions these roses bloom only once, and people who want “a rose for every month,” as the old catalogs used to hype about teas and floribundas, hold that strongly against them. Actually, it has been a complaint since Virgil extolled the “rose of Paestum,” an autumn damask that grew in abundance around the famous temples at Paestum, three of which are still standing. It was later celebrated in France as “quatre saisons” (an exaggeration) because it bloomed once in spring and later in autumn. And in 1817 a random hedgerow mating occurred on the Isle de Bourbon (now Ré-union) in the Indian Ocean, between the autumn damask and R. chinensis ‘Old Blush’. That produced the repeat-flowering ‘Rose Edouard’, and the promise of monthly flowers was almost within grasp.
It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this first Bourbon rose. Many roses offered in recent catalogs trace their most important characteristic, which is perpetual flowering, back to this improbable ancestor. They are called “carefree roses” or “landscape roses,” and contain the hugely popular ‘Knockout’ series. They promise both disease resistance and perpetual bloom from late spring until frost. The latter they certainly deliver, in abundance, for months and months. Their degree of disease resistance depends on where you garden and how much care you give them and the kind of summer it is, though certainly they are more “carefree” than many of the antique and modern shrub roses, and assuredly more than any hybrid tea. If carefree and perpetual bloom are for you, then rosewise, they are your best bet.
But we have thoughts about nonstop bloom in anything, just as we have thoughts about plastic and paper flowers. It isn’t just that the roses marketed that way lack soul, for that is obvious to anyone who knows Empress Josephine’s rich pink ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, or the superb white ‘Madame Hardy’ with its haunting green eye, raised by her gardener there and named after his wife, or the bawdily named ‘Cuisse de Nymphe’ (nymph’s thigh) that the English prudishly renamed ‘Great Maiden’s Blush’. Of course, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but the modern landscape roses don’t smell either. To date, beyond their undeniably healthy constitution, they also offer the promise of boring you to death.
Gardens are made up of festivals, great or small, and like any other holidays we celebrate, they require advance preparation—the getting of the tree, the boiling of eggs to paint or dye, the putting together of costumes for Hallowe’en, the buying of birthday presents and the trick candles and the baking of the cake, the gifts exchanged on anniversaries. When the roses bloom here, one of the great celebrations of our garden has come round. It also is not without its elaborate preparation, of laying down the more tender plants and covering them first with Remay and then with evergreen boughs; of uncovering them in spring, propping them up, and trimming out winter-damaged wood; of fertilizing and spraying and watching closely for bugs and diseases, of which there are some, though fortunately not many.
It is tedious work. Gardening often is. But in June, the most glorious month of our gardening year (if one had to choose just one), the roses bloom. Most are concentrated on either side of a long path that leads first through an eight-foot-tall yew hedge to the perennial garden, and then back out and beyond, to a shaded woodland walk and across the stream. Christopher Lloyd, on one of his many visits here, christened it the Rose Alley, and the name has stuck. But there are other roses, clustered against terraces and trained on the pergola or wherever a rose might grow.
From the beginning of our garden, it has been our custom during Rose Season to pick one from each bush and arrange them in bowls in the house, for their fragrance and to study their differences, maybe even to identify them individually, though alas, we have forgotten many of their names. Now there are so many roses in the garden that they will not fit into a single bowl, and so several are required, on the dining table, on the coffee table, and by each of our bedsides. Their fragrance is a haunt, all day long and well into our dreams. But it is the garden outside that draws us incessantly, many times in the day and from whatever task we have in hand. It is like a birthday. And who wouldn’t want a birthday every month of the year?
SEMPERVIVUMS
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, summer and winter, a pair of boots stood by the doorstep of a house in our village. Well-worn and down at heel, they were nevertheless Sorels, the sturdy boots with leather uppers and rubber treads that are almost as familiar a symbol of Vermont as a can of maple syrup. These boots, which belonged to the retired owner of the local sawmill, had clearly seen hard wear. But before being discarded (little is completely “wuthless” in Vermont), they had found a second use. Their rigid interiors were filled with earth, and from the top, from the laces, and even from the split toes, sempervivums spilled out. We are not sure this is the very best use we ever saw for such wonderful plants, but certainly it brought home the truth about them. They are both adorable in themselves and endlessly adaptable.
We doubt that our neighbor had ever heard the word “sempervivum.” If he had, he might have thought it referred to some sort of horticultural anthem and not what was growing in his boots. It is, however, the most reassuring of all plant names, made up of two Latin words signifying “always living.” And indeed, only two things can kill sempervivums outright—shade and poor drainage. Given a very little soil and a great deal of sun, colonies will continue their slow but steady increase as happily after the Zone 4 winters of Vermont as in th
e all-year mildness of San Diego (Zone 10). Wherever they grow, they make compact rosettes in tight colonies, the smallest species being little gray buttons scarcely half an inch wide, and the giants seldom achieving a diameter of five inches. They are native to high elevations through central and southern Europe into Asia Minor, and they are essentially rock plants, growing in thin deposits of gravelly scree or finding a toehold in fissures of granite cliffs. But as rock plants, they are unusual—even perhaps unique—in that their cultivation is child’s play (sometimes literally), but their charm is hardly lost on the most sophisticated members of the American Rock Garden Society.
Sempervivums have a long and distinguished history in western gardens. Pliny the Younger is the first to mention them by that name, recording the belief that plants growing on roofs deflected lightning and prevented fires. To the Middle Ages, apt even more than Pliny to blur the practical and the fanciful, this belief made entire sense. Why else would sempervivums choose to grow in such unlikely places? So, in the ninth century, Charlemagne, ever concerned with the well-being of his subjects, issued an edict that sempervivums were to be established on every house roof. It naturally followed that any plant possessed of unusual capacities must be medicinally valuable, and so medieval physicians prescribed teas of sempervivums to cure sores of the mouth, irritated throats, and bronchitis, all diseases of “heat” or fever, and the mucilaginous tissue of the inner leaves was believed to soothe burns and bee stings, as perhaps, like aloes, it does.
The two principal common names for sempervivums—hens-and-chicks and houseleeks—equally endear them to gardeners and nongardeners alike. Hens-and-chicks describes the growth habit of the plants, where every mature individual produces miniature versions of itself, either growing close beside its perfectly crafted rosette of leaves, or on corky, threadlike stolons an inch or two long, suggesting either a mother hen with her chicks tucked close about her or one whose chicks have strayed a bit. Houseleek is of less clear application, for no species even remotely resembles that garden vegetable. It is true that the succulent leaves have been gathered for salads, but the name, which descends from medieval English, more probably refers to the bloomy, gray-green color that some sempervivums share with the common leek, Allium porrum. In a time when spelling was more inspiration than science, house-leek was also a pun, since the most decayed roofs of houses both supported the plants best and could be presumed to leak.
Though universally pleasing to gardeners, sempervivums are cause for serious indigestion among botanists, for the genus is completely confused. It consists of about forty species, though for three reasons, no one can really be sure. First, all species show variants in the wild. Second, plants of the same species will differ markedly in appearance according to the conditions under which they are grown. And finally, all are dreadfully promiscuous, freely intercrossing among themselves and with their parents. Possibilities are therefore almost infinite. Even a bit of vegetable crusting isolated high on a Swiss mountainside might actually consist of two species and a swarm of offspring, each resembling one or the other parent, or each other, or nobody at all. And there are hybrids occurring naturally in gardens or by deliberate intervention, a welter that caused T. H. Everett, in his great garden encyclopedia, to cut through the Gordian knot of nomenclature by remarking bluntly, “The wise gardener will pick the sorts that he likes and use them in his garden for what they are, and not for what they are called . . .”
Inevitably, however, this very plethora of variations, so frustrating to the botanist, is a joy to us, who seem born to collect one of this and one of that and one of the other, wherever we can. Once you own two forms of sempervivums (or “semps,” as they are called), you’ll soon acquire a third, and then perhaps a dozen, submitting happily to the disease someone has called “sempervivuphilia.” After all, propagation is easy, cultural requirements are clear and undemanding, and plants will . . . well . . . live forever. It is hard to know how many chance encounters with sempervivums on visits to other gardens have caused us to beg a chick or two, bringing them home safely in our pockets. They have all survived.
Across nomenclatural confusion, a convenient broad distinction can be made between two clear species of sempervivums. Most plants on the market belong either to Sempervivum tectorum, the true houseleek—”tectorum” means “growing on roofs”—or to S. arachnoideum—from the Latin arachne, a “spider”—the cobwebby houseleek, so called because its tiny rosettes are netted over with threads of silver. Though the two species are closely related, they differ significantly in appearance. Houseleeks tend to be larger, sometimes to as much as six inches across, fleshier, and more open in their construction. Even when they seem colored a characteristic uniform, dull olive green, there will be a shading of bronze toward the tips of the leaves, or even deep metallic or rusty colors diffused throughout. By contrast, the cobwebby sorts are generally smaller, sometimes mere buttons a half-inch across, more rounded or ball-like in shape, typically celadon green, though their characteristic webbing gives them a silvery appearance. To these two dominant species may be added a third, S. calcareum, which repeats the fleshy, open rosettes of S. tectorum, but, in selections and hybrids, possesses some of the most subtle colorations in the genus, of plum and bronze. But throughout the three species there is such variety that you can simply buy or beg—never of course steal—what you like best.
The culture of sempervivums is simplicity itself. Their only requirements are a gritty, perfectly drained soil and baking sun. Indeed, their preferred mountain habitats, where soil is thin and summer sun abundant, give the vital clues to their needs. It also suggests their most exciting uses in gardens, for they require only a little soil, even so little as a cupful, settled in the hollow of a rock.
They relish stonework of all kinds, making glorious the faces of old decayed walls and even giving to new ones a look of settled age with surprising rapidity. (For that, they are often also called “stonecrops.”) Our largest collection grows happily across the face of the planted walls of the lower greenhouse. But because we find sempervivums irresistible, we have poked others into the low retaining walls of the perennial garden, though there we have concentrated mostly bloomy purple forms of S. calcareum and S.tectorum .
No other plant is as easy to establish in a wall, for a narrow crevice can be packed with fibrous loam or decomposed sod and a nursery-grown plant freed of its four-inch pot and squeezed gently in. No harm will be done by teasing away much of the earth from the roots of the plant so that its rosettes will be even with the faces of the stone. Even a single rosette can be inserted in a fissure with a little soil behind. It will soon occupy the space it has, and then colonize the adjoining stones.
Though sempervivums and walls seem made for one another, almost any shallow container will support a colony, or even a collection, provided it is perfectly drained. For all-year effects in cold gardens such as ours, and for chilly urban roof gardens, semps are perfect, for their gelatinous leaves seem to possess natural antifreeze, preventing them from bursting apart or turning to mush even after subzero winter lows. They are one of a very few plants that may be expected both to live and to be attractive in urns and pots in gardens that experience very cold winters. They may glorify an old chipped dishpan, a flat rock with the barest hollow, a terra cotta chimney tile, or a weathered cinder block. They’ll even do in an old pair of boots, if you happen to have one.
SNOWDROPS
EARLY EACH SPRING, we wonder whether we would love snowdrops if they bloomed in June, rather than at the end of a long, cold winter. Certainly they are beautiful enough to love at any time of the year: silken pearls in bud and winged when open to the warmth of an early spring day. They dangle on delicate, threadlike pedicels, dancing in the slightest breeze. They are the very definition of whiteness, the more for the icy, ethereal green that marks them all. But our passion for them (passion it is, for we love them more than any other flower) stems as much from our great need as from their great beauty. That n
eed is for light, change, and life after the still of winter. Somehow, they seem possessed of magical properties, breaking a curse of darkness. For when they choose to appear, winter cannot come again. Or if it does, it cannot stay.
Though it is possible for a person almost completely indifferent to flowers to conjure up the image of a snowdrop, there are in fact many snowdrops in the world. Nineteen species are recorded, and perhaps as many as five hundred cultivars. From one to another they look very much alike, especially when their tiny, modest flowers are viewed from high above. Always they are white, with three outer and three inner tepals. The outer tepals flare outward, and the three inner ones are gathered together to form a tiny cup. There is usually a green mark on the tip of each inner tepal, though sometimes—very rarely—that mark is yellow, offering a cause for great celebration. And there may be marks on the outer tepals as well, of the same haunting green. Sometimes the whole flower may go quite mad, with three to five outer tepals and as many as fifteen inner ones, bunched all together like a tiny rose. In the just over one hundred years that snowdrops have been closely observed in gardens (as opposed to merely cultivated, however lovingly), every smallest variation has been noted, named, and multiplied. An entire tribe of obsessed gardeners exists called “galanthophiles,” who vie with one another to amass the largest number of different forms, especially those that most rarely occur. Even variations in scent are noted, for most snow-drops possess a faint but delicate lemony fragrance. Not all, however, for Galanthus koenenianus is said to smell of urine and G. ‘William Thomson’ of soured laundry. (We do pity Mr. William Thomson, whoever he might have been, because of his snowdrop namesake. But we long to have him—it—in our collection.)