Ramblers retreat

IN the village where I grew up, all the cottages grew the same pink rambling rose against their walls. Blowsy, prickly and very sweet scented, my grandmother told me that its name was ‘Albertine’, a Wichurana Rambler introduced in France in 1921, the year my father was born.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

But why did everyone grow the same variety? The answer is because it was so easy to propagate: stuff 10 cuttings into the soil in autumn and, two years later, you have 10 flourishing rambling roses. Cuttings passed willingly between neighbours until everyone had a specimen or two to cover their walls.

But ‘Albertine’ wasn’t the only rambling rose to spread from cottage to cottage. Other villages have different varieties that were equally as popular because they are no less easy to grow. I know a village in Sussex where every house has sweetly musky, white-flowered ‘Albéric Barbier’. My wife grew up in the middle of Salisbury Plain, where the houses were wreathed in late-flowering crimson ‘Excelsa’ and there are many villages where the dominant rambler is pretty pink ‘Dorothy Perkins’ or pink-and-white ‘American Pillar’. If you ask the present-day owners for the name of their rose, they seldom know the answer, although ‘Village Maid’ is a catch-all that I come across from time to time.