One of my favourite roses is Chicago Peace, a Hybrid Tea Rose that lives each passage of its life in glorious splendor. It is a photographer's dream. From the coral pink of a budding rose, it unfurls petals of deep rose pink, and peach, and gracefully ages into soft pink, apricot, soft yellow, white and pale lilac.
A single rosebush, with blossoms opening on different days, will appear to be two distinctly different varieties of roses. Of the two pictured above, the blossom on the right, was the first to open. Days before, it looked very much like the rose on the left. Then, in it's last days, the opulent petals of the Chicago Peace rose fade to a champagne colour. Backlit by the noon sun, this rose shown below, is the personification of an aging diva.
The Chicago Peace rose is a descendant of the legendary Peace rose, a rose which almost never came into being. In the late 1930's, French grower, Francis Meilland and his Father, Antoine had hybridized a rose from a Margaret McGredy rose and an unknown seedling. Francis named test rose 3-35-40 the Madame A. Meilland Rose, in honour of his late Mother, Claudia Dubreuil.
When the German Army occupied the Meilland farm, they ordered that only food be grown. Francis shipped the rose stocks to friends in Turkey, Scandinavia, the USA, and even Italy and Germany. The shipment to Turkey was destroyed when the Nazis commandeered the train. The budwood shipments to Scandinavia, Italy and Germany did not make it to commercial production. The budwood from test rose 3-35-40, smuggled to the USA in a diplomatic satchel, on the last flight out, survived! After the Fall of Berlin, it was named Peace Rose.
When the United Nations first opened, the 49 U.N. delegates were each presented with a Peace rose, and a message which read, "We hope the 'Peace' rose will influence men's thoughts for everlasting world peace.
The more colourful descendant of the Peace rose, Chicago Peace was discovered in the Castigny Botanical Gardens in Wheaton, Illinois in 1962. It is described as having pink edging which is richer, brighter and deeper than the Peace Rose, although the colour varies with weather and the season.
As Francis Meilland would later write, "How strange to think that all these millions of rose bushes sprang from one tiny seed no bigger than the head of a pin - a seed which we might so easily have overlooked or neglected in a moment of inattention".
Photos copyright of: Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.
No comments:
Post a Comment