page_title: Frank Riethmuller
section_title: Turramurra
hierarchical_section_title: Frank Riethmuller / Biography / Turramurra
caption_attribution_description: Rose 'Kwinana '1962 by Riethmuller seen massed at the Victoria State Rose Garden, Werribee Park, Victoria
context_page_description: Frank Riethmuller was an Australian rose breeder.
context_section_description: Riethmuller's diaries confiscated by the security police show that he was growing roses (from Hazlewood Brothers) in Turramurra from 1932. In the mid-1930s he was more interested in dahlias and cactuses, renewing his interest in roses in 1937.
  In 1937 he bought land (probably the land he was already using) a few streets from Miss Hambledon's boarding house. The same year he built a small art-deco house on it. He was joined there by his unhappily married sister Sophia Bischof (1878–1972) and her third daughter Elsie (1909–2004), who stayed till both her uncle and mother had died. A sign on the front gate said "Miss E. Bischof dressmaker" but mostly Elsie was the housekeeper. Riethmuller made health plans in 1940 to move to a higher and drier property in Bowral or Moss Vale but nothing came of them.
  A next-door neighbour 1937–1939 remembered him as a homebody who, when he was not prostrated by illness, spent every day working in the garden.
  Ayliffe's, a local rose and carnation nursery, supplied him with roses from 1938 and pruned them. Riethmuller was thus at least 54 and living in Turramurra when he made his first known rose crosses; 61 when he retired to full-time rose breeding in 1945; 66 when he released his first rose for sale. All his best roses that we know about were bred in his last decade when he was over 70 and his health at its worst.
  "His large garden is packed with roses, a fair proportion of them of his own raising." Apart from his own seedlings, most roses he is known to have bred from are of German origin. He also bred from a couple of roses by Alister Clark, and emulated Clark's refusal to pamper seedlings: "He used to give his roses a post-pruning spray but didn’t spray at all otherwise. So his seedlings had to be disease-resistant to survive."
  In the early 1960s Roger Mann was his teenage pupil: "The colour shot of Frank Riethmuller [shown on the right] is as I remember him. He's standing in his back garden, in his 'rose garden' – actually a big single bed that occupied about half the area, and which held most of his collection … At the very back next to the fence he had his nursery beds, compost heaps etc and the shed … It was a splendid sight in mid-winter, when the main rose beds were all pruned and smothered in manure and straw. The ground sloped from front to back and there was a flight of steps up to the back porch where we'd sit and talk, and camellias growing against the house there … The front garden was fairly conventional, with a low brick front fence with some floribundas – 'Eutin' among them as I recall – but mainly other plants behind it; the bed was fairly narrow and shaded by the street trees. The house was set close to the south boundary, and there was a curving path to the front door lined on one side by maybe a dozen roses, among which I remember 'Sunlit' and 'Marjory Palmer'. It led into a bed at the corner of the house which had 'Cara Bella', 'Honeyflow' and 'Claret Cup' with 'Spring Song', and down the north side of the house where the land was a bit wider were half-a-dozen original plants of 'Titian' trained espalier and reaching the eaves … I remember asking him why he'd registered it as a floribunda when it was so obviously a climber, and he said he hadn't realised at the time that it would grow like that.
  Riethmuller died at 81 on 23 April 1965, bequeathing to the University of Sydney the proceeds of the sale of his house and garden: in 1972 they realised over $80,000, a big sum at the time.
caption: 'Kwinana,' 1962. Shoulder high clusters of single, 8-cm, red-orange flowers. Some scent, musky. The overall impression is of dressy artifice.
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