Hey, it's Jason again here at Fraser Valley Rose farm. Well, I'm here with a different kind of a video
I've decided to make a series of short videos
discussing the old garden roses
The reason is that when I talk to people about the Centifolias the Bourbons the Hybrid Perpetuals and so on
Kind of a blank look goes across their face, so I thought it might be worthwhile
giving a short outline of the different
classes of roses
I'll start with the Damasks and I guess I could have started anywhere
but the Damasks hold a special place in the history of roses because it's the rose of rose petals and rose perfume and
If you want to argue with me about that head down to Bulgaria or Iran or Afghanistan
Where they produce rose petals commercially and you'll find that the rose that's in their field is the Damask rose
Particularly, it might be a cultivar named Kazanlak, which I just added to my collection
but in any case it is the Damask
I wanted to go back and say that this was the first use that roses were
historically reputed for or revered for if you went back to
how the Egyptians used the rose the Syrians the Romans the Greeks
all of them would have first grown the rose in the field not primarily as a garden rose and
certainly not for cut flowers yet, but for their use in rose petals now there are
historical
references back to how the Romans littered the streets with roses and had elaborate Rosalia festivals and so on and
that's kind of the
basis for the modern romance that the Roses began to
Take in Western culture. So
I will admit that those roses could have been any one of a number of classes of roses
And I'm quite sure, or at least the historians are quite sure
That the Albas the Gallicas and the Damasks were present in Roman times. But how do they know that?
well, it's a bit of a it's a bit of a match game go through the writings of old Roman poets and and
historians and try to match off the roses
that are mentioned there to the characteristics of roses that were known in the Middle Ages and
You know as a as a match game, it can be imperfect
but
what they've kind of come to is there was a Virgil mentioned the twice blooming rose of Paestum and
That they believe was the Autumn Damask just because it matches
Blooms once in the spring once in the fall and there weren't too many old roses that did that
So they believed that was the Autumn Damask. There was another rose that was mentioned in Roman times
And this is the one for those lavish festivals
They talked about the Rose of a hundred
leaves or Rose of 100 petals and not quite sure how the translation goes then they call it rosa Centifolia or
At least modern historians called it rosa Centifolia
this might be a case of
Mistaken identity because the rose that we currently call
Rosa Centifolia was bred in France and Holland in like the 17th century
so it clearly wasn't that rose and a reexamination of the history books
has led them to believe that that rose at the talk about that was strewn in the streets of Rome
Was the Damask rose
just an early form of the Damask with lots and lots of petals and
Actually while we're talking about how the Romans used their roses, I think there's kind of a neat scene
I'll show you here and I'll I'll try to throw a picture up at the same time in this
blank piece of wall
Beside me here is of the the banquet of Elagabalus
who was a Roman Emperor and
Reputedly or as the story goes and I'm not sure how accurate any of this is
That he had a false ceiling installed in his banquet room and when the guests were there
they dropped tons of flower petals onto the guests roses and violets and
on one of these occasions that the
petals were so heavy that
Some of the guests were smothered to death because they couldn't reach the top of the pile
so it's that vision of excess and that carried with culturally with the roses for a long time that
Idea that they were for the wealthy that they they showed power wealth
excess
and luxury now I should say here that from the time of the Romans and
those great stories from that time period
The Damasks disappear from the history books for a while during the dark ages
Maybe history books themselves disappeared for a while in the dark ages. I don't know
You could well imagine as I do that the damask rose
traveled east with the eastern Roman Empire and persisted in their gardens in
the areas that we would currently call Turkey and Iran and Syria and
In fact, that's where we next see
mention of the damask grows now in the Roman times as I mentioned
They didn't really have the name Damask attached to it
so some time around the eleven hundreds the Crusaders were heading into the Middle East and
as this story goes
Robert de Brie was a knight in the crusades who?
Brought back to Europe the Damask rose and I imagine
He said something like "This is the rose of Damacus" and I only say it that way because I assume that's how Crusader talks
Although he may be rather more French than that, but that story stuck to the rose so they called it the Damask rose
Even though that was just the place where it was recovered and may have been present in the gardens of Europe already
From that point in history, the damask rose is much better recorded. They have notes of how it was incorporated into
Many of the other classes of old garden roses and then onwards into the modern roses. It was especially notable because it
transmitted that Damask scent which is what they sometimes refer to as the "Old garden rose" scent into
Many of the new roses also when they founded the rose growing regions that they grew for perfume
Commercially or industrially that's the rose that that came to be the dominant rose in those regions. So without further ado
I thought I might talk about the roses themselves as they exist in our gardens today. The first I'll show you is the
Damask rose or Rosa X damascena and
This one grows
roughly about
Six to eight feet but they maintain it in the Rose fields at six. It may grow taller than that in a more temperate region
and one thing neat to say about it is that
in cultivation
They say that if they pick the flower very first thing in the morning just as its opening
It may be up to an ounce heavier then later on in the day when some of that scent has been released into the air
So very heavy with perfume. A second one
I want to talk about and this one has a story as well is Omar Khayyam and
From the picture there, you'll see that Omar Khayyam is sort of buttoned in the center
But then kind of looser on the outside of it to me
It has the the look of a half-made bed a little bit untidy
But the story that comes along with it is that it was found at the grave site of the great
poet and
Mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Omar Khayyam in what would be modern day Iran and taken back to Europe
so his name has been attached to that rose and
It does have a soft pink color so beautiful Rose
third one 'Yolande d'Aragon' with a
strong pink color
beautiful form and I will draw your attention, especially
To the fancy sepals on this one
If you can see that in the photo, the sepals are long and ornate and that's characteristic of the Damasks
Next I'll show you
Leda, wow, what a beautiful rose, and I guess
The name comes from the story of Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology
and
It has that cherry red edge
the on the outside lip of the rose just gorgeous and got a good picture up there for you and
Finally, maybe I'll show you Madame Hardy which to me
This is my favorite damask
And you know, it may have other breeding in it as it's a later Damask and but it's just gorgeous
look at that green eye on there again with the ornate sepals and in just
You know, even if it never fully opened you'd look at those sepals you think wow, that's that's kind of a
spectacular rose
Heavily scented. I think it was Graham Thomas who said that this was the
most perfect rose
ever to bloom
And I won't argue the point in my garden. I'm extremely fond of it as well
Well, if you're considering adding a Damask rose to your garden, you might want to know something about its garden characteristics. So here goes
First of all once blooming for most Damasks - there is the autumn damask which has rebloom later on in the fall
But most of these Damasks are once bloomers. in terms of height and size in the garden
They tend to be a fairly upright shrub and very pleasing in form
Usually averaging in my garden six to eight feet or at least I can manage or maintain them to six or eight feet in both
height and width
They are all highly scented
I mentioned those characteristic ornamental sepals on the shrubs. in terms of their disease resistance. I'll say that
They've got no better no worse than on average than everything else that's in my garden
because I'm on the moist west coast of North America here
I they might prefer a somewhat drier warmer climate
But that said they perform quite nicely in the garden
I also wanted to mention that the Damask roses ended up in the breeding of a lot of the other old garden roses
including notably the Portland roses and
pictured here will be the
Duchess of Portland and you can see that it's very characteristically Damask.
I'll mention more about this one when I get to the video on the Portland class but
Gorgeous rose and blooms all season. So if you're looking for something that's a lot like a Damask but blooms a lot more
The Portlands would be a great group to look into
another one that I'll mention here is the Bourbon roses and I'll throw up an example
The story of the Bourbon roses again. I'll go into that a little further when I get to that video
Is that on the Isle de Bourbon
They were a natural cross between the Autumn damask and a China rose. So they're first-generation
Hybrids, and and they're of the old garden roses of Europe and the Chinese roses just as they were arriving
into Europe and and coming through all those shipping and trading lanes at the time and
Finally, I'll mention one last thing for the rose geeks who have lasted to the very end of the video
Is that some people will ask what is the actual breeding of
the
of the Damask rose and
All of these all of the roses will at one point or another be related to wild roses of the world
We believe or at least modern genetic researchers believe that the damask rose. It's related to
Rosea gallica
Rosa mochata and a third species that you've probably never heard of Rosa Fedtschenkoana
Which is also a fall rebloomer. So those three roses together
or their wild counterparts would have figured into the breeding of the
Damask rose probably happened as a wild cross
natural cross somewhere in Central Asia before it
Traveled probably with travelers along that you can imagine the silk routes
And ended up in the Middle East and in the Roman Empire
Alright, that should wrap it up for the Damask roses
Next up, the Gallicas and thank you so much for watching if you have any comments about this or even corrections
I'm not above that leave those in the in the notes below