Rosa hybrid 'Louis Philippe'

Rosa 'Louis Philippe' came into the world in 1834 at Angers, France, raised by the rosarian Modeste Guérin and named for the man then on the throne, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. His blood was royal in a second sense. Guérin is said to have bred him from 'Slater's Crimson China', one of the handful of repeat-blooming China roses that had reached Europe a generation earlier and overturned everything Western gardeners thought a rose could do. That rose had grown in Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison and been painted there by Redouté, and cuttings of its line found their way to Guérin's bench. This was a fashionable, well-connected rose, bound for the gardens of the European elite.

He did not stay fashionable. He went south, and then he went feral. The rose reached America in the hands of Lorenzo de Zavala, the Yucatán-born statesman who served as Mexico's minister to the court of Louis Philippe and went on to become the first vice president of the Republic of Texas. His wife Emily had loved the roses at the French king's court, and when the de Zavalas came to Texas in 1835 to throw in with the revolution, the rose came too, planted at their place in Lynchburg, across the water from the San Jacinto battleground. Texans called it the Zavala rose. The wider South, where it turned up at every old homestead and half the country cemeteries, called it something humbler: the Cracker rose.

He is an old China rose and behaves like one, which is the whole point of him. The flowers come loosely double, about two inches, a deep rose red warming to a blush of lighter pink at the center, now and then threaded with a single pale streak, the giveaway of his China parentage. He blooms, and blooms, and blooms. The Chinas earned the Latin name semperflorens, ever-flowering, and he earns it daily, carrying color from spring to frost and starting up again the moment a winter warm spell fools him into it. The scent is light, a soft tea fragrance you have to lean in for. He asks for almost nothing in return: full sun, ordinary soil that drains, and room to mound into a bushy three to six feet. He is heat-proof in a way that flattens hybrid teas, drought-tolerant once rooted, and what blackspot the Southern summer throws at him he largely cures himself, shedding the bad leaves and pushing clean growth as the weather turns. Texas A&M put him on their EarthKind list of roses that thrive on neglect, which is worth more than any show ribbon. Hardy from zone 7 through 10, root-hardy where winters bite and all but evergreen where they do not. One note for collectors: he is easily mistaken for 'Cramoisi Supérieur', his near-twin, and gives himself away by his more compact frame and the way his color shifts from flower to flower.

A rose bred for a king and adopted by everyone else, still blooming on its own at the edge of old farms a century after the hands that planted it were gone. Grow him for the ceaseless red, and for the long Southern story folded into one undemanding shrub.