the kindness of strangers

I love big, splashy plants as much as the next per­son, but there’s a plant that I’ve got a spe­cial attach­ment to that’s nei­ther big nor splashy.

Green rose

The green rose, Rosa chi­nen­sis virid­i­flora, lives up to its name. When the “flow­ers” open, what’s inside the pro­tec­tive sepals is cer­tainly green. But there are no rose petals in sight. The blos­som just keeps on open­ing, reveal­ing more and more sepals, all of them green in color, some­times tinged with a red­dish cin­na­mon color. Inside a typ­i­cal rose, once the sepals unfurl and the petals open, you finally get to the pis­tils and sta­mens, the repro­duc­tive parts that enable sex­ual repro­duc­tion and per­pet­u­a­tion of the species. But this plant lacks them too, just like it lacks petals. If this plant were to turn up in nature, it’d go extinct once the sin­gle plant passed on.

Its his­tory is a lit­tle fuzzy, though it was for sure intro­duced to the rose-growing world in 1856 by Bem­bridge and Har­ri­son in Eng­land. In The his­tory of the rose by Roy E. Shep­perd, the author notes that the plant has been in cul­ti­va­tion since 1743, which for a plant with no hopes of repro­duc­tion by seeds is quite a feat. Through the years, peo­ple have found some­thing about this plant inter­est­ing enough to start cut­tings or make grafts onto root­stock or whole­sale dig up the plant and take it along with them when they move.

I was a rose geek in my early teen years, grow­ing and exhibit­ing roses around the Los Ange­les area. At one point I had some­thing over a hun­dred roses, includ­ing this one. I moved down to San Diego, and by the later 1980s finally had a house with room for plants. My par­ents were mov­ing out of the home­stead, and for some rea­son I felt the need to res­cue this one rose from an uncer­tain future. Of all the roses, I dug up this one and moved only this one. Read­ing through some of the posts on this rose at davesgarden.com–includ­ing some­one who moved her great grandmother’s plant–I’m not the only with an attach­ment to it.

And some­how, through the kind­ness of strangers smit­ten with this won­der­fully weird plant, the green rose has stayed in cul­ti­va­tion for some­thing like 264 years.

December 10 2007 05:09 pm | Categories: my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: •

3 Responses to “the kindness of strangers”

  1. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » a signature plant: green rose on 16 Dec 2008 at 5:03 am #

    […] I did a post on the green rose over a year ago. I won’t repeat all the details from the first post but you can see my notes here. […]

  2. tina on 16 Dec 2008 at 11:44 pm #

    A very, very inter­est­ing plant indeed. I have never seen it or even heard of it. I’d say this is the per­fect choice for you for a sig­na­ture plant. Being a rose geek and only dig­ging this one says some­thing mighty big about it, and about you too, a sur­vivor maybe?

  3. lostlandscape on 17 Dec 2008 at 7:23 am #

    Tina–Yes, I think all a garden’s plant choices say at least a lit­tle about the gar­dener. In this case, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the nur­tur­ing, prop­a­ga­tion and sur­vival of an unusual plant that couldn’t sur­vive any other way can push a lot of but­tons for gar­den­ers of a cer­tain stripe…even if the plant isn’t a splashy one.

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