7 JULY 1973, Page 28

Country Life Corning up roses Peter Quince

At this season of roses I often wonder, subversively, whether all the trouble men have taken, over innumerable centuries, to multiply and elaborate the rose has been as profitable as is commonly supposed. It is not that I do not enjoy the results, generally speaking, although many of the modern roses, products of intricate and skilful hybridisation though they may be, seem to me incontestably garish and vulgar.

But however much I appreciate a well-conducted rose garden, or the sight of an old house embowered in flowering ramblers and climbers, soon

afterwards I usually fincl

myself passing by some °lc fields, where the wild roses havi gone their way unchecked; and i always seems to me, I'm afraid, tt make a far finer picture than thi most dazzling assortment of hy brid teas or floribundas or what, ever.

It is not an entirely comfortabli reflection for any gardener. M3 own patch of land contains varii ous triumphs of the hybridistl • craft, as well as some splendid oddities like the striped ' Ross Mundi,' which is supposed to be a sport rather than a hybrid, an which has flourished in thi country since the sixteenth cen tury, so they say. All the same, freely admit to a faint sense of del feat when I contemplate, at thi i moment each year, the in comparable flower show which the wild roses manage to arrange quite unassisted by the great regil ment of gardeners with their fer tilisers and sprays and theil laborious pruning and tending. 1

The fact is, of course, that our need to concentrate riches in a little room in gardens is almost enough, in itself, to drive us to rely upon the confected kind of rose which the commercial growers manufacture. Wild roses. given their heads, can easily swal. low up half an acre, and their display of flower, although riotous13' prodigal while it lasts, is brief; for the rest of the year there is just a neglected thicket, much appreciated by small birds but of limited .decorative utility. That is why they grow steadily more rare in the bleakly efficient context of modern agriculture.

However, my part of England is fe fortunate (as I would put it — perti

haps the farmers would see it differently) in possessing, still, a fair number of those half-forgotten w

hedges which rise to the height of a

small trees, and which contain II within their flora many thriving G

colonies of wild roses. There isii one place to which I often take visiting friends who are also gar deners, if they should happen to ti descend upon us at this season.ii They never fail to marvel at the thousands upon thousands of rose flowers which cascade down the billowing slopes of those ragged old hedges.

The huge scale of the spectacle. by gardener's standards, is startling; and yet each individual flower is of a simplicity which most people. I notice, find of greater appeal, when they are confronted by it, than the fiercehued complexity of so many garden roses.

The great blankets of bloom. rest lightly upon the contours of the overgrown hedges, with a faultless smoothness we toil for many hours to emulate with our pillar roses and ramblers, Here. one is tempted to say, is a perfection of the gardener's art; and it is all done by leaving things alone, except perhaps for an occasional slashing attack with a billhook or the clumsy attentions of a herd of bullocks. "Unkempt about those hedges blows, An English unofficial rose." It hardly seems fair.