The Hundred Petal Rose
Bank holiday roses and a lost rosarium by way of Stoke Newington
Here it is: bank holiday Monday, grey after weeks of sunshine. I have been looking back through my iPhone photos of the month, and I see roses everywhere. So early! It’s hard to write about roses without using clichés, so instead, this is a mostly visual tour of the roses I’ve seen recently. There seem to have been cascades of them everywhere.
At Chelsea Flower Show the David Austin stand was like something from a fairytale, loops of roses, all perfect-perfect. The lovely thing there is to be able to smell-before-you-buy. I love Queen of Sweden (above) and Desdemona. I haven’t yet made up my mind on the new stripy King’s Rose. It has divided the crowds - do you love it or hate it?
From the new to the very old…For London Craft Week I ventured to Abney Park, a cemetery up the road from us in Stoke Newington. WAX Atelier had taken over a studio there and were busy making the most beautiful roses out of linen and wax. They were playing on the history of Abney Park that was opened by the Victorians as a winning combo of a rosarium, an arboretum and a cemetery - in 1840 there were 2500 trees and over 1000 types of rose flowering there. Today there’s no trace of them amongst the graves.
According to the archives, one of the varieties growing in the park was the Centifolia foliacea - or hundred petal rose. Made by hand, each wax petal has been replicated - coloured with rose pigments and scented with rose oil. The finished wax flowers evoke the scent of the park’s lost roses, drifting through time.
Roses - as well as scent - connect us through the ages. My parents sent me these pictures below from a rose specialist in Provence they went to see earlier this month. There’s something very charming about all the rows of terracotta pots and the wigwams. It could easily be 100 years ago.
Just imagine the smell.
Meanwhile back in Hackney, we have been doing rose tours of our own.
My niece Marigold and I stopped to look at these ramblers. She turned to me and said, “we appreciate flowers more than others because we ARE flowers." Maybe that’s why…
With roses like this why would you need parking, why would you even need a car?
If you have a favourite rose tour, please share it and send me a picture. Otherwise, this book might be a good way to continue onwards as it features Ngoc Minh Ngo’s photographs of rose gardens all over the world from England to Italy to Morocco to Japan. There will be a talk with the her and Tania Compton at The Garden Museum on 3rd June, livestream tickets are £10. Have a rose-scented week,
