The world's great roses

Arthur Hellyer MBE, VMH, tells the story of how modern roses were created

- Arthur Hellyer MBE, VMH

THE story of the modern rose begins in about 1867, when Jean-Baptiste Guillot, a French rose breeder, sent out a new rose under the name ‘La France’. He listed it as a tea rose because it had appeared in a batch of seedlings he had raised from tea-rose seed, but it differed in several notable respects from existing tea roses and has since been shown to be the hybrid probably the result of an accidental mating between one of Guillot’s tea-rose seed parents and a hybrid perpetual rose.

To understand the significance of ‘La France’, one must know something about its predecessors. Hybrid perpetual roses had large, shapely, fully double flowers, mainly in pink and red, but despite their name, they flowered for a comparatively short period each summer. Tea roses also had shapely, though -fragile flowers, and a limited colour range, mainly in pink, peach, pale yellow and white. Most were tender, but most flowered in two or three successive flushes during the summer and early autumn.

‘La France’ inherited the best qualities of each rose, plus an improved bushy habit. Its pink flowers were full and sweetly scented, and they bloomed from June to October. It was, in fact, the prototype of a new race of roses, later to be christened hybrid tea.

Hybrid tea

It was the hybrid tea that at first attracted the greatest attention, and Englishman Henry Bennett was one of the first to concentrate on the new rose. From 1879-1890, he raised a number of good varieties, of which probably the best remembered today is ‘Lady Mary Fitzwilliam’, not so much for its own sake as for its parentage of other roses.