The
perfume of fresh corduroy or dotted Swiss material lingers on my mind,
whenever I think of genealogy, both of the human kind, and that of
plants. As a child, I often sat with my Grama Daisy, who sometimes worked from home as a seamstress while taking care of her three grandchildren. Her
ever-quick mind was always studying something, and it was there I got a
primer education both as a genealogist and as a horticulturalist. Both
endeavors require critical observation and comparison skills.
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In the wild, certain colors of roses are natural, such as white, red,
yellow, pink, and variations of those colors occur naturally. However,
even in Roman times, roses were hybridized to achieve certain desired
colors and types of blooms.
Thanks to hybridizing, with the exception of the elusive blue rose,
mankind and womankind has largely succeeded in achieving roses of many
hues, which brings me to the subject of orange roses.
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Here in the South, azaleas, tulip trees, and other early bloomers are
already smiling upon us, but none so pleasing to the eye than the old
roses here in the historic district where I live.
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“Where summers are hot and humid, is it wise to plant roses where they get full sun?”
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What is a Tea Rose?
——- Jan De Graff, from Amsterdam
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In the broad field of rose culture, past and present, a big question mark stands out. Why is it that the Moss Rose was
so universally popular, present in every garden, over a hundred years
ago, yet so seldom seen in gardens today? Many a present day rose grower
has never seen one. Many more little of the usefulness and the charm of
this type of rose.
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Perhaps it’s the sun, or the heady sweet perfume of the garden rose
blossoms, because immediately I am taken back to that same time period —
when the women of my grandmother’s Blue Rose Society, dreamed an
impossible dream — perfecting the first double blue rose. As a young
girl, sitting on the sidelines, while they held their weekly luncheon
meetings, I was certain they’d lost their minds or at least were
drinking something more than mint julep tea.
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