Rosa banksiae 'Lutea'

Of all the plants that carry Sir Joseph Banks's name, and there are a great many, this rose carries his wife's. Banks was the most powerful botanist of his age: president of the Royal Society, the man who effectively built Kew, who had sailed with Cook to the far side of the world. When a thornless climbing rose came west out of the Chinese gardens, it was named not for him but for Dorothea, Lady Banks. The white double arrived first, collected at Canton in 1807. This one, the yellow, followed in 1824, carried back by the plant hunter John Damper Parks by way of the Calcutta botanic garden, an old Chinese garden form that had been grown and selected for generations before any Englishman set eyes on it.

She is the most generous of the Banks roses. For a few weeks in March and April, timed with the azaleas and the dogwoods, she covers herself in hanging sprays of small soft-yellow rosettes, hundreds to a cane, each flower no wider than a thumbnail and stuffed with petals. She blooms once and does not repeat, which is the bargain these roses strike: everything at once, then a long green rest. One thing the catalogs tend to fudge is the perfume. She has almost none. The famous violet scent belongs to her white sister; the yellow traded most of it away, and what she offers in exchange is hardiness and sheer volume of bloom.

She is nearly thornless, her long green canes smooth enough to train over an arch you walk under or a gate you lean on, which is why these roses turn up so often around porches and paths and in gardens where children play. Give her full sun, which she needs to ripen her wood for the next year's flowers, and almost any soil that drains; once established she is drought-tolerant and shrugs off the blackspot and mildew that plague lesser roses. She is the hardiest of her clan, reliable through zone 7 and into zone 6 with a sheltered wall, evergreen where winters stay mild and merely deciduous where they do not. The one rule worth knowing is when not to prune. She flowers on side-shoots two and three years old, so a winter tidy-up cuts off the show before it starts. Wait until the bloom is spent, then take out only the oldest wood. Her white sister, for the record, is the Tombstone rose in Arizona, a single Lady Banks set out in 1885 that now shades some eight thousand square feet on a trunk no one can reach around.

A rose named for a botanist's wife and grown ever since for her thornless ease and her one extravagant yellow fortnight. She wants more room than seems reasonable and full sun to ripen in, and where she gets both she becomes the kind of spring event the neighbors plan their walks around.