Rose History An ardent amateur gardener complains that no catalogue
and indeed no book known to him gives the desired information about roses. What is a tea rose, for example, or a musk rose and how did the garden grow? Our garden roses—how splendid they are now at their second bloom- ing!—are new as flowers go. The so called " Perpetual " did not become common property till about 1840, though autumn-flowering roses were known in Rome in classical times, in Egypt and undoubtedly in China. The old Blush Monthly (now too much neglected) was introduced in 1796. A little later two other Chinese roses were brought to England and presently transferred to France where they were crossed; and the tea-scented rose was born about 1830. The origin of the hybrid perpetual is more obscure, but it was due again to a French hybridiser and became known some five or six years later. The full opportunity was now presented for the creation of an unlimited family of perpetual flowering roses. As to musk rose, it is a rough-flowered, sweet-scented briar from abroad and the term is quite wrongly applied, by a number of our poets, to the English dog and field roses. French growers had an early pre-eminence partly because the first tea roses, which were rather tender, rarely ripened seed out of doors in England. Botanically there are some sixteen so-called sections or grouped species of rose from which all our roses have sprung.
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