Being in my garden is my greatest joy.\u00a0 But life events this year have sliced into garden time, shredding it into small, irregular increments.\u00a0 The situation will improve eventually, but as the growing season has progressed, I have learned that even absence from my garden has its compensations.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Before this awakening, she viewed everyday items, like detergent bottles, as simple things, ultimately bound for the recycling bin.\u00a0 Now, those same containers have morphed into design elements as she imagines them in the company of flowers, leaves, grasses and branches.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She has discovered that anything that holds water also holds amazing possibilities.<\/p>\n
Bountiful flower arrangements take a lot of plant material\u2014always more than the arranger expects–and my friend could not harvest enough from her own garden.\u00a0 Mine, with its currently untamed explosion of flowering plants, interesting foliage and persistent seedheads, offered abundant options.\u00a0 When my neighbor asked if she could use my flowers, I agreed right away.\u00a0 Now she sends me pictures of her amazing arrangements and I can see bits of my garden recombined in a brand new way.\u00a0 Her \u201cVenus de Milo\u201d arrangement featured some of my peach-toned,\u00a0 oak-leaf hydrangeas standing in for the goddess\u2019 skin.\u00a0 A few of my coneflowers played a supporting role in a Cy Twombley-inspired composition.\u00a0 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 \u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 roses. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I stared at the picture and then raced outside to clip a spray from the bush, which blooms right near the front porch.\u00a0 A flood of garden memories washed over me<\/p>\n
\u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 was one of the first roses bred in this country.\u00a0 It is the namesake of Phillip Noisette, scion of a family of French horticulturists, who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina around 1800.\u00a0 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 \u2018Old Blush\u2019 or \u2018Parson\u2019s Pink China\u2019.\u00a0 Champney crossed the gift rose with Rosa moschata, a fragrant white species rose.\u00a0 He named one of the best offspring, \u2018Champney\u2019s Pink Cluster\u2019, and presented it to Noisette.\u00a0 My \u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 and all the others in existence are descended from a plant that Noisette grew from the seeds of \u2018Champney\u2019s Pink Cluster\u2019.<\/p>\n
Noisette\u2019s rose is blush pink in the bud, opening to palest pink or white flowers that become whiter with age.\u00a0 Flowering in clusters, the individual blooms are like pompoms, with golden stamens nearly hidden in the middle.\u00a0 The fragrance is wonderful\u2014sweet with an overtone of clove.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s enough to make even a \u2018Knock Out\u2019 rose envious.<\/p>\n
With charms like that, it was not surprising that the American shrub rose crossed the Atlantic and found favor in Europe.\u00a0 \u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 was so fashionable, in fact, that \u00a0its portrait was painted by the great botanical artist, Pierre-Joseph\u00a0 Redout\u00e9 in 1821. \u00a0\u00a0Mine looks much like that illustration. \u00a0The variety has survived two centuries of the waxing and waning of old rose enthusiasm and is still available from specialty vendors today.<\/p>\n
I bought my \u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 in Williamsburg, Virginia, which is very fitting, considering the rose\u2019s early American origins.\u00a0 Williamsburg is also the place where my husband and I spent our honeymoon.\u00a0 We were on a sentimental journey back to that old city when \u2018Blush Noisette\u2019 called out to me and I answered.\u00a0 For the past fifteen or so years, it has been growing vigorously, supported by the skeleton of a deceased yew shrub.\u00a0 During the growing season, the bare yew branches are completely covered in the fresh green rose foliage.\u00a0 Visitors often fall in love with it at first sniff.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
It is so good and reliable that I almost took it for granted, until my neighbor started using the flowers in her arrangements.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The rose\u2014and its possibilities\u2014have always been there.\u00a0 Only my perspective has changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Being in my garden is my greatest joy.\u00a0 But life events this year have sliced into garden time, shredding it into small, irregular increments.\u00a0 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1494,1414,1497,731,1496,1493,1495,1498],"class_list":["post-1962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-blush-noisette","tag-easy-roses","tag-flower-arranging","tag-fragrant-roses","tag-john-champney","tag-old-roses","tag-phillip-noisette","tag-white-roses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}