The Florida agriculturist., 1907-08-21
THE PERFECT ROSE.
Something We May Work and Hope
For. But Which We Do Not
Now Have

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The serious rose grower is likely to
think of the rose as a flower, and moi
as a shrub, and so long as he does
that he will never have beautiful
rose garden It is too much to ex-
pect, Of course, that rose growers
should give up their present system
of cultivation at once and altogether
Many Of Our finest modern roses re
quire to be pruned back hard every
spring, so that they may give all theil
strength to the production OF thel1
splendid flowers. But this hard prun
ing is practiced far more than it neee
be, practised, indeed, upon roses which
would bloom freely enough if they
we're scarcely pruned at all, and woulC
be far more beautiful objects in the
garden. And it has come to be sc
practised because roses are consider
ed only for ther flowers, as fruit trees
are considered only for their fruit
We prune the fruit tree without any
thought of it's beauty as a tree, anC
rightly. But in pruning the rose we
should think always of it's beauty as {
shrub, and when a rose will not bios
som we'll except when it is pruned out
of all beauty of habit, then we should
consider it an inferior plant and grow
it, if we grow it at all, some back
part Of our garden among the plants
that are used for cut flowers.
Few rose gardens at present are
beautiful themselves, though they may
contain many beautiful flowers, be-
cause they are apt to consist to q
great extent Of roses that have to be
pruned out of all beauty of habit and
also because the roses in them are
cultivated in a manner which makes
beauty impossible. Standard roses are
we'll enough in their place, in border
for instance, rising occasionally above
an underground of other plants, but
the serious rose grower, usually avoids
such an underground because he fears
that it will exhaust the soil and pre-
vent his roses from bearing the fin
est possible blooms. He therefore
plants his standards in patches in plots
of bare soil. Nothing can look more
gaunt and forlorn than number ot
standards SO grown, when they have
Just been pruned hard back; and ever
when they are in full bloom they have
no beauty except in their flowers
Even dwarf roses grown in this way
are apt to look as if they were in 3
nursery garden, and for more than
half the year they are scarcely less
ugly than standards. Thus one result
OF all these wonderful novelties, of ali
the florists industry and skill, is that
the rose garden is usually not SO beau
tlful a place as it must have been a
hundred years ago, when it was filled
with damask and Provence roses and
the old white rose, free of growth
and, even when not in flower, beauti-
tul all through the summer by reason
OF their leaves, which are much more
abundant and of a much lighter greer
than those of most modern lone
blooming roses. We cannot, however
expect gardeners to go back to these
nor can we expect them 20 fill then
rose gardens mainly with the beautiful
species recently introduced or with
the rampant growing Ramblers ane
other roses, for most of these, too, on
ly blossom once in the year, and we
are all ready to make a good man,
sacrifices for the long Towering roses
But without rushing to extremes anC
condemning these roses altogether
we can recognize the fact, which is still
almost entirely ignored, that It IS a
serious defect in rose that it should
require to be pruned out of all beau-
ty of habit before it will flower we'll
and when once this fact is generally
recognized, when roses are grow,
more for themselves than for their