Welcome ‘Cary Grant’ and ‘Audrey Hepburn’ into your garden Roses have been named after famous people for over 60 years but now some gardeners find it tempting to collect these themed high quality named varieties ‘Audrey Hepburn’ is very scented and free blooming while ‘Cary Grant’ is sturdy and disease resistant. They both remain as elegant and stylish as their Hollywood hey days but their appearance in gardens as quality roses marks something of a popular trend amongst gardeners to select roses not only for their colour, scent and resistance to disease but for their names of famous personalities and particularly film stars. What could be more natural? After all, many famous people have their own perfume. But perfumes come and go, and roses don’t. It’s much easier to become ‘immortal’ by having a rose named after you. That’s why some rose lovers opt now to fill their gardens with ‘royalty ‘ ‘film stars’ or even ‘composers’. So, for example, Rose ‘Queen Elizabeth’ is an exquisite floribunda rose and is a perfect way to commemorate the Queen’s 90th birthday. It became an instant hit after the start of her reign, a robust, disease resistant variety with a tall upright habit with a profusion of long-stemmed rounded pink flowers. You can easily add to this Rosa ‘Prince Charles’ a deciduous shrub with nearly thornless stems bearing reddish-purple flowers in summer. To complete the royal family dynasty you can add Duchess Catherine and Duke William Of Cambridge as the royal couple have two beautiful roses named after them. The Catherine rose is peachy pink and is sweet-scented while the William rose is a vibrant red. So this is where the themes start to build. Rose historian Malcolm Grantham says while there are thousands of roses named after everyone from Mozart to Abraham Lincoln, Agatha Christie to Freddie Mercury, Stephen Fry to Bobby Charlton he is aware that gardeners love adding some famous film star names when it comes to roses. “I, for one, would have great fun inviting people into my garden and saying, come and have a look at Marilyn 42
Monroe, she’s a bit blowsy today, or ‘I was looking at Audrey Hepburn this morning and she’s gorgeous’. I might even risk it with ‘I think ‘Elizabeth Taylor, needs a drink today’. “But there is a serious point that all these roses are of the highest quality, carefully propagated to give the rose lover something that’s more than just a name . It seems however than the name is important”. The first rose to be named after a person was ‘Dorothy Perkins’. Jackson and Perkins was a company formed by Charles Perkins and his father-in-law, Albert Jackson in the USA in the 1800s. Charles Perkins had a grand-daughter named Dorothy and they developed a rambling rose which they named after her. The roses named after famous people and the list literally runs into thousands have to be the best of roses. The fashion for the roses names after the popular movie stars began in the 1950s. Women dominated the names of flowers but then the male actors joined in. So if you want your own Oscar winning line up what is on the market?
Naming your own rose If you like the idea of naming a rose after a loved one then there’s a number of options - but it isn’t cheap. It can cost anything from £1,000 to £20,000 depending how ambitious you want to be. The cheapest option is to have a rose which is exclusive to you but not catalogued. For £1,000 you choose from a pre-selected group of roses and pick the colour and classification. You receive 30 plants of your selection. If you desire something more of an horticultural statement then it’s more expensive and can cost up to £20,000. Your rose goes through the same selection process but is offered to growers nationwide for inclusion in catalogues and needs to conform to UK Plant Breeders’ Rights applications.
David Austin roses has a large collection of named roses www.davidaustinroses.co.uk Historic Roses group also has named roses amonst its historic collection www.historicroses.org
Country Gardener