Being in my garden is my greatest joy. But life events this year have sliced into garden time, shredding it into small, irregular increments. The situation will improve eventually, but as the growing season has progressed, I have learned that even absence from my garden has its compensations.
The lesson came from my neighbor, a former knitwear designer and avid gardener who joined the local garden club and discovered all the artistic possibilities of flower arranging. Before this awakening, she viewed everyday items, like detergent bottles, as simple things, ultimately bound for the recycling bin. Now, those same containers have morphed into design elements as she imagines them in the company of flowers, leaves, grasses and branches. She has discovered that anything that holds water also holds amazing possibilities.
Bountiful flower arrangements take a lot of plant material—always more than the arranger expects–and my friend could not harvest enough from her own garden. Mine, with its currently untamed explosion of flowering plants, interesting foliage and persistent seedheads, offered abundant options. When my neighbor asked if she could use my flowers, I agreed right away. Now she sends me pictures of her amazing arrangements and I can see bits of my garden recombined in a brand new way. Her “Venus de Milo” arrangement featured some of my peach-toned, oak-leaf hydrangeas standing in for the goddess’ skin. A few of my coneflowers played a supporting role in a Cy Twombley-inspired composition. A recent favorite featured two wire hanging baskets placed rim-to-rim to form a globe and adorned with plant material that included some of my old-fashioned ‘Blush Noisette’ roses. I stared at the picture and then raced outside to clip a spray from the bush, which blooms right near the front porch. A flood of garden memories washed over me
‘Blush Noisette’ was one of the first roses bred in this country. It is the namesake of Phillip Noisette, scion of a family of French horticulturists, who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina around 1800. Noisette had a friendly relationship with one of his neighbors, John Champney, a rice planter, to whom he gave a Chinese rose that was known as ‘Old Blush’ or ‘Parson’s Pink China’. Champney crossed the gift rose with Rosa moschata, a fragrant white species rose. He named one of the best offspring, ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster’, and presented it to Noisette. My ‘Blush Noisette’ and all the others in existence are descended from a plant that Noisette grew from the seeds of ‘Champney’s Pink Cluster’.
Noisette’s rose is blush pink in the bud, opening to palest pink or white flowers that become whiter with age. Flowering in clusters, the individual blooms are like pompoms, with golden stamens nearly hidden in the middle. The fragrance is wonderful—sweet with an overtone of clove. Best of all, the bush blooms nearly continuously from spring through frost, has almost no thorns and seems, at least in my garden, to be immune to normal rose problems like blackspot and powdery mildew. It’s enough to make even a ‘Knock Out’ rose envious.
With charms like that, it was not surprising that the American shrub rose crossed the Atlantic and found favor in Europe. ‘Blush Noisette’ was so fashionable, in fact, that its portrait was painted by the great botanical artist, Pierre-Joseph Redouté in 1821. Mine looks much like that illustration. The variety has survived two centuries of the waxing and waning of old rose enthusiasm and is still available from specialty vendors today.
I bought my ‘Blush Noisette’ in Williamsburg, Virginia, which is very fitting, considering the rose’s early American origins. Williamsburg is also the place where my husband and I spent our honeymoon. We were on a sentimental journey back to that old city when ‘Blush Noisette’ called out to me and I answered. For the past fifteen or so years, it has been growing vigorously, supported by the skeleton of a deceased yew shrub. During the growing season, the bare yew branches are completely covered in the fresh green rose foliage. Visitors often fall in love with it at first sniff. It has survived hard winters, torrid summers, drought, neglect and every other peril that can afflict roses and has bloomed faithfully and abundantly every year.
It is so good and reliable that I almost took it for granted, until my neighbor started using the flowers in her arrangements. Now as I look at the picture of the wide-open blooms poking out of the repurposed hanging basket/globe, I see my old American rose in a completely new way.
The rose—and its possibilities—have always been there. Only my perspective has changed.