WHEN he was interviewed a few months before his death at the age of 92 in 2018, nurseryman David Austin, dubbed the ‘Father of English Roses’, marvelled at his fortune in having ‘been able to make a life out of breeding roses’.
The son of a Shropshire farmer, he had already developed an interest in the subject by the time he was old enough to begin working at the family farm in Albrighton. His great love, however, was the charm and fragrance of old types of rose, so, at a time when the solid, all-purpose, Hybrid Teas were everywhere, he set about breeding new types that combined the rosette-shaped elegance and scents of old roses with the diversity of colour and repeat-flowering characteristics of the Hybrid Teas.
Across almost 60 years, Austin introduced more than 200 named English rose cultivars, but might be said to have reached the pinnacle of his ambition with the shrub rose cultivar Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, introduced in 1986. Its parents were Rosa ‘Wife of Bath’ crossed with Rosa ‘Comte de Chambord’. Coming some 15 years after he’d launched his first range of what he termed English Roses, his creation lived up to her name.
Esta historia es de la edición June 16, 2021 de Country Life UK.
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