“The Rose Rustlers” is a fun book, a bit of a garden journal, a bit diary mixed with a family photo album. Nominated for an AHS award, the authors Greg Grant and William Welch take turns sharing their stories, their favorite plants (mostly roses), and their favorite people.
Their heroes are a dedicated group promoting old roses, many of the plants surviving with no care in cemeteries or abandoned home sites throughout Texas. While this is a very different climate from ours, every gardener will appreciate the tenacity of plants that are good-doers and the humans that cherish them.
One quirk of this book is the nomenclature. Rose variety names in single quotation marks are cultivars, the same as with most plants. Other varieties have double quotation marks, meaning these are study names. These substitute for real names that have been lost in time. No quotation marks means this rose is legendary and needs no further clarification, including “popular roses like the butterfly rose, the sweetheart rose, and the green rose.”
There is a lot of good horticultural advice and garden design in this book, but best are the stories. The “Air Conditioner Rose”, was name because Grant’s first planting of it covered unsightly equipment. It also survived being under salt water for two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. A suckering rose in Scottsville, Texas has possibly survived since 1834. The magenta flowers are sometimes flushed with blue edges.
These roses are resilient. “Roses didn’t start out as wimpy flowers. Humans did that to them. In addition to being beautiful in a simplistic way, roses were initially wiry and mean as snakes. This made them perfect Texans, of course. If an antique rose is still around, it’s because it’s tough and because it’s pretty.”
Excerpted from the Summer 2018 Arboretum Bulletin.