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A tiny little rose that I bought from Aberconwy Nursery in 2012. A note online by Baul Barden, 'Old Garden Roses and Beyond', quotes a letter written by Henry Correvon: "A few years ago a friend of mine, Dr. Roulet, found in a little villge near Gradson, a very minute Rose grown in pots in the windows. It was a miniscule shrub, five centimetres high, bushy, and covered with small roses not exceeding one and a half centimetres broad (just like a sixpenny piece). He told me about the plant and I went to see them; but just at that time the whole village of Mauborget had been burned, so we could not find a single plant. Local people stated that a woman in another village, Onnens, five miles way, had a similar plant. So we went there and my friend obtained a little growth of the rose, which he gave me. We increased it, and soon had hundreds of plants which I named Rosa Rouletii, after my friend. This is the most liliputian of all Roses, but where these good people got it from nobody can say. ' It has been grown here for centuries, but only in windows and never out in the garden, as it is too delicate a plant,' - so say the peasants. After studying the subject I found in Candolle's Prodromus, Vol.2 p.600, that there was in the beginning of the nineteenth century a form of Rosa indica II called humilis by Seringe and pumila by Redoute, which is said to be minutis. But mine is minutissima. In her classical Rose book, Miss Willmott mentions a Rose chinensis var minima, Rehder (The Fairy Rose), but she means the Lawrence Rose we grow at Floraire, which is not the same as my plant. Who can tell me anything aout it? The village of Mauborget, where this tiny rose has grown "for centuries", is not far from Champagne, above Gradson, where de Candlle had his garden. Did M. de Candolle grow the plant in his house, and has it thus been distributed in the neighbourhood? I could not find any trace of this rose elsewhere in the country, and nobody, not even old people, could give me any further explanations. They all seem to believe that the minute Rose is an old kind from time immemorial in Mauborget. Of course, it is better for pot culture in windows than in the open ground. We planted some in a bed in order to get material for cuttings, and there it lost something of its character of a dwarf compressed shrub, and grew higher (ten centimetres high). But the flowers and the leaves are never larger than in the case of window plants, and it remains the smallest of all shrubs. It flowers perpetually, and I have just been out to gather little buds from under the snow covering my garden at Floraire, which I send you herewith. Henry Correvon, Geneva." |
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| 11th June 2012 | ||
