News

All that's old is new again

THE roses at Flemington are treated with tender loving care to ensure they are at their floriferous best for the annual Melbourne Cup carnival. But the lifespan of many of these modern hybrids creating bountiful blooms is only about 12 years. When they are past their use-by date, they are replaced with another variety to start the cycle again for the next spring racing season.

In the real world, heritage roses endure with what they're given. Tea roses, especially, have a strong survival instinct, many of them thriving in cemeteries in front of headstones planted by grieving relatives.

In the Coburg cemetery, a pale pink tea rose with a yellow centre has been growing in front of a grave - where a husband and wife are buried, one in 1914, the other three years later - for nearly 100 years. The trunk is thick and gnarled and the rose stem about nine metres, which produces masses of blooms each year.

Geoff Crowhurst, co-ordinator of the Greater Melbourne group of Heritage Roses in Australia, treats it like a special friend and visits often to check on its welfare. He says it's amazing how well it's done over the years with no special treatment.

''I sent a cutting-grown plant to South Australia, where it is now being grown at Ruston's Roses at Renmark and old rose experts there will try to identify which tea rose it is, if they can.''

He visits other cemeteries seeking similar old roses and also arranges to have them identified.

''I've been going around cemeteries for years as that's where you find lots of old roses. I'm like a rose sleuth with a bag and a pair of secateurs to see what I can find. In recent years, though, they're dying out, especially if there's a cemetery trust, because they clear up the area using Roundup, which kills everything and they wouldn't know an old rose from anything.''

Crowhurst says the passion for old or heritage roses is increasing as modern hybrids lose favour.

''People are tiring of the modern varieties and also they want to show the old roses, and the modern hybrid teas are stiff in growth habit and need looking after too much.''

The Australian heritage rose association started in 1979 with the aim of advancing the preservation, cultivation, distribution and study of old garden roses no longer in general commercial cultivation, roses of historical importance and species roses and their hybrids.

It also brought together people who loved and collected old roses and survivors from Australian colonial gardens.

''There's been a long struggle to identify the old roses as many of them were around before colour photography, so we look for characteristics such as buds and prickles to identify them accurately,'' Crowhurst says.

Old garden roses include those belonging to any of the classes that existed before 1867, when the first hybrid tea rose, 'La France', was introduced.

Tea roses are making a comeback. Descended from Chinese-garden hybrids and introduced to Europe in the 19th century, they bloom continuously in favourable conditions. Rosarian Diana Fickling fell in love with heritage roses after seeing a photograph of the highly fragrant, summer-flowering centifolia rose, 'Fantin-Latour'.

Eventually, her garden was a walk through the history of the Rosa genus, with more than 200 varieties, including Gallicas, Bourbons, Albas, Hybrid Musks, Portland, China, Alister Clark varieties (named after the Australian breeder of the early 1900s) and David Austin English roses.

Fickling shared her garden with like-minded rosarians by having open days but now she's moved on so it's up to others to inspire people about the beauty of heritage roses.