Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today's the day I'm going to finish my series
on the old garden roses and i saved one of the most interesting classes for last - at least in my
opinion it's the Portland roses and it all starts with a story about this humble but mysterious rose
the 'Duchess of Portland' which it's winter now so it doesn't look so impressive but it is December
and it has buds and blooms on it both so you know it's a re-blooming rose but it's an old European
rose there's a genetic mystery going on here that i want to talk to you about it's a bit windy
outside here so i suspect that's going to get in the way of the sound let's move inside so i can
put some pictures to this and tell you the story some of the most interesting things that happened
to roses in rose history happened around the year 1800 give or take a couple of decades and it's
really interesting how many of my other videos on the old garden roses seem to converge around this
point the China's and Bourbons would have been arriving from the east and by a slightly different
route although still from China ancestry the Noisette roses would have been arriving from the
Americas at this around the same time Empress Josephine was making her great collection
at mel maison and this signaled the height of the era of french breeding of the gallica roses
so with all of these things happening with all these extraordinary rose events there is
a mystery around this one rose that's rose this duchess of portland seems to have been collected
by either the second or third Duchess of Portland thus its name back to england from places unknown
this first story said italy but we really don't know the genesis of this rose the rose itself is
very simple and unassuming very wide open flowers hot pink color and what they would have called red
at the time or close to it and that's about it but the one thing it did have is it was a re-bloomer
at a time when the public was very very thirsty for that reblooming characteristic the China roses
were just arriving and that idea that you could have a rose that bloomed all the way through the
year was just an amazing feature compared to the once bloomers in the spring the thing though is
that the Portland rose - the Duchess of Portland didn't look like the China roses at all kind of
looked like a Gallica or a Damask rose and all the rumors about where it came from
they said it came from Italy and that it was bred from Slater's Crimson China but that doesn't turn
out to be the truth at all lots of people who knew the rose as well including the English rosarian
Peter Beales looked at it and said the character of this is just wrong this was obviously much later
and his suspicions were confirmed when they did genetic testing on this rose it appears
that this is just a straight up cross between the Autumn Damask and the Gallica rose which is
a bit of a genetic mystery here if you know what i mean so i'm going to go and explain this here is
that the reblooming characteristic of roses is thought to be a recessive
characteristic and certainly when you saw other crosses happening here i'm going to talk about
'Cardinal de Richelieu' as a Gallica cross with a China or Madame Plantier which is a which is an Alba
cross with a Noisette and even though one of the parents was reblooming and the other
one was non-re-blooming the resulting cross was non-re-blooming so here if you had a cross between
the Autumn Damask which is a sparse rebloomer in the fall and a Gallica rose how could that
which is once blooming how could that result in a strong re-bloomer like the Duchess of Portland
now we may never solve the genetic mystery around how that whole thing happened but
what makes it even more confounding is that when the French breeders brought them back and began
crossing the Duchess of Portland with their once blooming Gallicas what resulted was a class of
re-blooming roses now i'm not going to say that these are perpetually blooming roses but they
are the kinds of roses that bloomed in flushes throughout the season and in terms of their
characteristics they kind of matched a very good intermediate between the Damasks and the Gallicas
that strong Damask scent the one that you would characterize as the rose perfume scent
mixed with the longer lasting fragrance of the Gallicas but softer to me is the finest of all of
the scents and roses and when i smell Rose de Rescht that's what i get is tomatoes the nicest of all of
the scents and it's that mixture of the Gallica and the Damask no China involved as it turns out
the resulting crosses of the French breeders built a class of many hundreds of roses that were all
the rage in Europe and you'll recognize this story that the Moss roses came to popularity and then
came out of fashion this happened to the Portlands too but not before they had a big impact
on what it looked like to have a beautiful garden rose first of all they weren't
super tall and lanky like the Alba's and the Damasks they were shorter and more compact like
the gallicas they had that nice scent which i love and they have that old garden rose
look to the flowers very full petals nothing of the high centered reflexed petals of the
tea roses that were coming in at the time so in that way they looked rather old-fashioned to the
European buyers at the time they came in those color ranges between white like blank de viber
or all the way to the deepest red that was available at the time like rose dereshed
now where did they go basically they all disappeared when they went out of
fashion there's only something like in the range of 12 or 15 commercially available
Portland roses that you'll find on the market at least in north america here there may be some
others in collections but it really has shrunk down they went out of fashion what followed after
this and like i say 1800 and the following years were just like like an orgy of roses the Hybrid
Perpetual class came up and that was a mixture of all of those old garden roses including one of
the Portlands as an important parent Rose du Roi now they mixed in the bourbons they mixed in the
Gallicas they mixed in the Portland's they mixed in everything that was in Europe up to the time
and made those Hybrid Perpetual roses now the Hybrid Perpetuals in their own way even though
they're one of the children of the Portland rose they killed the Portland rose as a class
they had the wider color range of the china's they had some of the new flowering
looks to them the reflexed petals the high centered the bigger flowers so in a kind of a way they
kind of wiped the Portlands off the map what was assumed at the time that the Portland roses were
an offshoot of the China roses kind of justified them being lumped in with the Hybrid Perpetuals
but what we know now is that they were a complete genetic abnormality a complete diversion in the
line of the Gallica and the Damask roses that if they had happened in a slightly different timing
if the China roses had come a little bit later and they'd had time to establish i think they
would have dominated European roses for a length of time that would have allowed some interesting
hybridization to happen after that time of course we'll never know that but i do want to go through
some pictures of some of the Portland roses that still remain because they are very very pretty and
in in my mind some of the nicest roses that i've grown although i've only grown a handful here so
of course there is the Duchess of Portland itself kind of a a lax but low shrub that has simple
dark pink flowers and a nice scent and blooms and flushes throughout the season two of the most
widely grown portlands now are Comte de Chambord and Rose de Rescht. Comte ed Chambord in a pleasing
light pink and Rose de Rescht and it's about as dark as they come almost red it's between pink and red
so very beautiful i want to mention Yolande d'Aragon because i previously misidentified in that as a
Damask rose in my video on that topic but it turns out it is a portland so it does have some rebloom
to it and i also wanted to mention Blanc de Vibert mentioned that earlier it's a white version of the
portland roses last but not least though what has been widely put out there as one of the best roses
of all time is Jacques Cartier and i can't argue one little bit i've grown it for the first time
in my garden in the last couple of years and every time i walk by it it stops me beautiful
flat cupped flowers so many petals great scent just a really wonderful and graceful rose and
worth having in your garden and before i finish up here i just want to throw up a graphic showing
where the portland roses end up on my family tree of roses and you'll
see of course up above it the parents are the Autumn Damask and the Gallica as i described
and it then goes on a line downwards to show that it's one of the parents of the Hybrid Perpetuals
all right thank you so much for watching today and thanks for everybody for their patience of me
finishing the series on the old garden roses i'm going to link a playlist down below that shows all
of my videos on the types of roses but the whole series is in there so that's fantastic and as you
may know it is my tradition on these videos to save one little snippet of information for the
very end for those who are patient enough to watch the whole thing and this has to do with
that Rose du Roi the best known of the portland roses and is thought to be the first
of the true hybrid perpetuals as well they kind of give it that special place bridging the two
it was born as a creation of a french hybridist and i think his name was leluere so at first it
had that name or rose de leluere then it followed that it was named that the political situation
changed in europe Napoleon as we know his wife had that big collection of roses at Malmaison
he was defeated and then exiled and at the time that he was exiled they reinstalled
the king of france louis the 18th i think in this case and renamed the rose Rose du Roi or
rosa the king well a few years later Napoleon broke out of exile came on back and for some short
period of time before he was defeated again the rose was renamed the rose of the emperor rather
than the rose of the king and then of course when he was finally defeated and exiled for the
for the last time they renamed it back to Rose du Roi so many roses have interesting stories i think
that one has one of the funner stories of names that i've come across thanks so much for watching