The first serious rose book I read was one by the famous rosarian and writer, Graham Stewart Thomas (The Graham Stewart Thomas Rose Book, 1994). I'd been collecting and planting old garden roses beginning in the seventies, one of which was a favorite, the California nursery catalog, Roses of Yesterday. I started out with mostly cold hardy roses that could take the frigid winters in far northern Utah. I treasured this and other catalogs of old roses that I'd later found on the Internet, not only for the plants they offered, but also for their helpful information on classification and cultivation.

These catalogs led me to collect several rose dictionaries, such as The Ultimate Rose Book, a several-pound monster of a tome that rose enthusiasts with weak wrists would be smart to store on a  library stand (as I do).

And then, deciding to get serious, I sent for and read the above mentioned The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book.  One of the roses described in this book was a David Austin introduction, a climber that was his first attempt in the development of his English Rose line, having the characteristics of old roses with modern vigor and disease resistance. He named this introduction 'Constance Spry' (shown at right), honoring an English designer, decorator, writer, and lecturer, who is credited with turning around the art of arranging flowers and gardens in an easy cottage style that is stil current. 

I sent for one plant of 'Constance Spry' from Austin's nursery then and have since planted four more.  Lovely roses. Spectacular at bloom time.

How to Propagate a Book

Since that Thomas book moved into our home and – like clothes hangers that seem to reproduce all by themselves in closets – rose books have proliferated like dandelions along my shelves. In addition, I've found Internet sites on roses through Google Search – a wonderful resource, Google –  and receive every year numberless rose catalogs packed with useful information and newly discovered old rose varieties. Often these old varieties are "found" roses, grown from cuttings taken from roses around abandoned houses and cemeteries. Then, enlarging upon the work of David Austin, catalogs are now offering the French hybrid "Romantica" roses from the House of Meidland. These are roses having many of the characteristics of old roses but in smaller bushes, closer to the size of hybrid teas. (See below for a list of sites offering these and both old garden roses and Austin's new introductions.)

To finally get to the point of this story, when an advertisement for Brenner and Scanniello's Rose by Any Name popped up on my computer screen (via Amazon.com) the first thing I thought of was why in the world would I want another book on roses? I was already piling them up on the floor. I felt, besides (hubris aside), that I'd learned everything I could by now about roses.

But upon further reflection, what I was short of was a book on the language of roses and that's what I thought this book was. Being not only a rose addict, but a book addict, too, I sent for A Rose by Any Name immediately. So was it a book on the language of roses? No, indeed. It was instead a fascinating compendium of the names of roses (such as 'Constance Spry', for instance), and the political climate surrounding the introduction of the rose, what type of money changed hands for the naming, a history of the rose's development itself, and the love of a wife or admiration of a hero which led to the naming. This is all stitched together in the most natural way with lively writing moving the stories along swiftly.

Take Constance Spry (left, courtesy of Design Museum, (c) Constance Spry Ltd), who has a three-page commentary on her life and the rose named for her in A Rose by Any Name. Spry, as the authors explained, "championed self-expression and experimentation at her chic London and New York shops, in the thirteen books she wrote for do-it-yourselfers, and at the Domestic Science School where she taught the applied arts of decorating, cookery, and entertaining."

Spry's Advocacy of the Cottage Garden

It seems that in the early twentieth century decorating followed the staid Edwardian style, extending even to flower arrangements in which anything other than stems of the same flower decorously arranged in vases was looked upon as vulgar. It followed, then, that Spry's innovations were looked upon at first as infra dig in a gentlewoman's garden.  This frame of mind is difficult for present day flower lovers to understand, when the most coveted arrangements today are tumbling masses of perennials, annuals, grasses, and even a vegetable leaf or two.

Spry's innovative decoration extended to gardens themselves,  which turned away from a formal Edwardian march of neat, geometrically arranged beds and toward cottage gardens following each other in an organic manner of mixed perennials (sample at right, in DragonGoose Farm's South Copse).

'York and Lancaster'

Another fascinating section in A Rose by Any Name, is the excellent treatment of the rose, 'York and Lancaster', describing the drawn-out Wars of the Roses starting in the 1400s. Here is the authors' cogent description of the start of those wars. After a "spat" between two of England's royal families about who deserved to wear the crown, the authors talk of the type of rose each wore as their standards – York's white, believed to be Alba semiplena, and Lancaster's red, believed to be Rosa gallica 'Officianalis'


After these decades-long wars finally wound down, a truce is called and the emblem chosen by both sides as a symbol of their new found amity is the 'York and Lancaster' rose, an eccentric blossom that some times blooms as dark pink and white, some times plain white, and sometimes all dark pink -- any of which may show up on the same plant.

I had already been interested in the Wars of the Roses. I had done a piece for this web site about those conflicts, having  had for some years several plants of Rosa gallica 'Officianalis' and quite a large plant of the climber, Rosa Alba semiplena. At about that time, I had ordered three plants of 'York and Lancaster', raised especially for me by Vintage Gardens nursery, in order to round out the group. It took two or three years from the date of the order to garden-ready plants, so I received the three 'York and Lancaster' plants only last spring.  Later in the summer I had the first blooms on one of the plants, which are indeed charming though they were all pink.

So I was well primed for this book's wars of the roses section at the very end of the book, which I actually turned to first as soon as I opened it.

 The authors quote the Spanish physician and botanist Nicolas Monardes (writing in 1551) describing this plant. "[He] wrote a faithful description of the flower still grown today as 'York and Lancaster', or Rosa x damascena 'Versicolor',  citing 'irregularly shaped flowers, that may be pure red or pure white, or part red and part white. Flowers of these different colorings may, and often do, appear on the same bush at the same time.'"

Note, that in the time of Monardes, red was used to describe both "red" and what we now call "pink."  A rose like Rosa gallica 'Officianalis' which is dark pink would be called, summarily, red.  The name, pink, for the color light red, didn't come into use until the 17th century in describing the flowers of pinks, the pinked (or sawtooth) edged flowers of plants in the genus Dianthus, which were often light red.



"Madame Eglentyne, the highfalutin English prioress in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," writes the authors of A Rose by Any Name, "took pride in her schoolgirl French and genteel manners. This superior Mother Superior would have adored being named after a blossom with a fancy-sounding French label – as long as no fellow pilgrim (that coarse wife of Bath, par exemple) made cracks about a wickedly thorny rose running wild in hedgerows throughout Christendom."

Ah, so that's where Chaucer's Madame Eglentyne's name came from! I read about Rosa eglanteria dating back beyond the 1500s, indeed back to prehistoric times. It was the reason I sent for a plant of it many years ago (including the fact that it was said to be indestructible). I read about its being what Shakespeare mentions as the" sweetbriar," which gave it a nice historical aura. But I didn't know the significance of Madame Eglentyne as Chaucer's choice of a name for the prickly prioress. The one thing I'm sure of, is that this rose is prickly.

A few years ago, my daughter Melanie and I asked our landscape guy to cut the thing down to three feet and allow it to grow up again without it looking like a death-dealing briar patch (as it did at that point). Inside of three years it was back to what you see above, and I can attest to the fact that Melanie will never again try to prune the thing without a full suit of armor. She came in all disheveled one afternoon, hair pulled out of her pony tail in ratty chunks. She had attempted a pruning excursion in its prickly depths and said she was thinking at one point of screaming for help when it caught her inside and refused to let her out.

More Fragrant Than a Dozen Roses

Ah, but this devilish rose is wonderfully fragrant! Brenner and Scanniello speak of R eglanteria's fragrant foliage and the only slightly fragrant flowers. But what is astonishing is that while patches of snow litter the ground around DragonGoose Farm, the Eglantine fragrance from our big 8x8 lady here drifts for many yards around, and the only source of this fragrance could be the bare canes. We have two other Eglantines in the garden, fast growing to mature size, both of which I transplanted from plants under the mother tree -- both of them breeding true. I planted them in two different areas of the garden, mainly for the fragrance given off  by the canes and leaves.

But back to this book, A Rose by Any Name. I recommend it highly to everyone who both loves roses, is curious about the origin of their names, and also has a love of history. Want to learn about the difficulty of saving the seedlings of the 'Peace' rose during World War II? Why is that beautiful "ruffly apricot" hybrid tea called 'Just Joey'? You want to be truly grossed out? Read about the creamy white rose, 'Mademoiselle de Sombreuil' and what its namesake had to go through to save her aged father from the execution during the French Revolution (It's not what you might think!). What happened between Napolean and his beloved Josephine that they should be divorced and from which family came the beautiful estate, Malmaison, site of Josephine's extensive rose gardens?

I haven't counted how many roses the authors discuss, but there is an index of 17 pages of fine print, each page having four columns – almost entirely rose names.

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Best from DragonGoose Farm,

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Photos - Joan Katherine Shaw, except for the portrait of Constance Spry which is from Design Museum (c)Constance Spry Ltd. 

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A Rose by Any Name –  The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names

A Rose by Any Name, by  Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2009. Lovely illustrations. Amazon has it at a good price, and if you buy it through the link provided on this page, DragonGoose.com gets a small percentage of the sale price.

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Click to enter American Rose Society site

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All contents copyright (c) 2000-2009 by Joan K. Shaw.  All rights reserved.