Roses without the fuss. Old garden roses, species, and healthy shrubs grown on their own roots and chosen for a hot, humid climate, left largely to their own devices to flower freely.
The double white Lady Banks rose is a true heirloom of Southern gardens, the kind of rose a grandmother trusted and passed along over the fence. Unlike most roses, this one asks for little and gives a great deal. Nearly thornless, the long green canes climb with ease, spilling over fences, arbors, and old farm gates as they have for generations.
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.
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.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
The pink Cherokee rose is a big, vigorous, early-flowering climber grown for one glorious effect: large, single, silvery-pink flowers, up to four inches across, each a simple five-petaled saucer lit by a central boss of gold stamens. Where the true Cherokee rose blooms white, this one blooms in clear, soft pink, and opens early, in the first warm reach of spring, ahead of most roses.
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
Vigorous spreading, deciduous hybrid rose climber also known as 'Spanish Beauty'. It has large pink flowers that are red in bud. It blooms in the spring. Its foliage is dark green and relatively free of common rose problems. I can grow in full sun or on a north wall. Heavy petal flowers tend to nod which is advantage in roses usually seen from below. This hybrid by Pedro Dot of Spain was introduced in 1927.
The single white Lady Banks rose is the wild original, the mother of the whole clan, and to many noses the most fragrant rose in the garden. This is the species itself, Rosa banksiae in the true, single-flowered form, a vigorous, all but thornless evergreen climber from the hills and gorges of central China, capable of thirty or forty feet where a wall or a big tree will hold the weight. In spring the long, smooth green canes disappear under great hanging sprays of small single white flowers, each with a boss of gold stamens and a clean, sweet, violet-like scent that carries across a garden.
We have discontinued the propagation of this plant due to extensive documentation of invasive growth across the southeast. This page serves as a reference.
