A lavish still life composition: a cabbage rose spilling its petals next to an antique botanical illustration of Rosa chinensis, with a Chinese porcelain teacup and a Dutch Golden Age-style palette knife in the foreground. Soft morning light filters through Regent's Park rose arches in the background, blending historical elements with a living garden scene.
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Roses
Cabbage roses or Centifolias are more easily recognised than most as the petals fold over each other not unlike a cabbage. The cabbage rose itself R. x centifolia is also called the Provence rose. It originated in Holland in the sixteenth century, which may be why it also appears in so many Dutch paintings. Generally, cabbage roses are middle-sized, thorny shrubs with huge many-petalled, sumptuous flowers that tend to overhang on thin, slender branches. Bourbon roses tend to have globular flowers that are quartered and filled with overlapping petals.
They can be a range of colours from white to pink, crimson and even purple. They can be shrubs or climbers and are usually extremely fragrant, with one commonly planted variety Mme. Isaac Pereire even having a raspberry scent. Their other great character is that they are repeat flowering from the summer to late autumn. Unromantically, they get their name from the Ile de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean where they were first planted as hedging.
China roses often have small, dainty flowers, shiny leaves, a light, open, airy habit and sometimes smell of tea. Their most important feature, which has made their influence on modern roses immense, is that they can repeat flower to the point where flowers can appear every month of the year. Before the first R. chinensis arrived in 1795, this character was unknown to breeders in the west, although the Chinese had been cultivating them for centuries earlier. Kew is also a good place to see more modern roses and hybrids such as hybrid musks and hybrid teas.
Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park boasts 12,000 roses and has the current advantage of many being well-labelled. Of note are the collections of climbers, ramblers, rugosas and miniatures. Hampton Court Palace gardens has more modern roses than you might expect e.g. hybrid tea and floribunda, although there is also a collection of old Tudor roses. Wisley can be recommended for its shrub and English roses. Other gardens around London have their own individual specialities e.g. Capel Manor and Valley Gardens (species roses) and Polesden Lacey (Edwardian roses, Portland, hybrid musk and hybrid perpetual).
The latter rose was the shrub rose of choice in Victorian London. Another Victorian favourite were the peculiar-looking moss roses; these were mutations of cabbage roses that produce excessive glandular growths on their sepals.
This ‘moss’ can emit a balsam scent when touched and in varieties such as Chapeau du Napoleon the ‘moss’ is so thick the flower is reminiscent of a tricorn hat.
