Kingston closed the door of the workshop behind him, went across the large airy room with its three vertical skylights and sat down at the drawing board. The workshop was one of the first new buildings to be constructed on the garden site. He had designed it to function as the nerve centre, as it were, for the entire garden operation. It served as an office for him; a place to store records, which were becoming more voluminous every day; a design centre with computers appended with all the obligatory peripherals and a large drawing board; a library for garden books and catalogues; and a place where they could hold meetings and the occasional celebration—as they had when the reflection pool was uncovered.
In front of him on the architect’s drawing table was a large sketchpad with rough designs for what would soon be the rose garden. It was one of his pet projects and so far he had given Jamie no hint of what he was planning. As far as he was concerned, roses would get top billing and he was spending a disproportionate amount of time making sure that both his design and his selection of shrub varieties, climbers and ramblers were impeccable. He wanted it to come as a complete surprise.
Just when he first became infatuated with roses, he couldn’t remember. Much as with one’s taste in art, music and other pleasures mature, what had started as an amusing dalliance had developed over many years to become a passionate love affair. In this respect, he was certainly in good company—that much he knew. He had lectured on the subject so many times that he could still rattle much of it off by rote. The names of writers, poets and artists who have commemorated and eulogized the rose would fill volumes. Starting with Sappho, Horace and Virgil, the rose weaves its literary way through the centuries in the prose of Shakespeare, Herrick, Wordsworth, Yeats and the Brownings. To this day books about roses appear and will continue to appear on bookshop shelves with predictable certainty. In the history of art the rose reigns supreme. Botticelli, Manet, de La Tour, Georgia O’Keefe were all enthralled by the queen of flowers.
Botanists, plant biologists and historians generally agree that roses were cultivated five thousand years ago. (Fossil evidence in North America suggests that roses flourished at least thirty-two million years ago.) Over the centuries they bloomed in the land of the Pharaohs and were cultivated in Bronze Age Crete; Grecian coins of the fifth century BC depict a rose on one side. Roses just kept growing and growing in the plots and hearts of gardeners all over the globe. By the end of the eighteenth century there were more than a thousand varieties.
Today’s would-be rose aficionado is faced with a dazzling choice of old and new hybrids. Take your pick: from chaste whites and negligee pinks all the way to peppery and damson reds. Blooms the size of a fingernail or as large as a pie plate. Many voluptuously perfumed, most bristling with thorns. Miniature, ground cover, shrub, landscape, patio, standard, climber, rambler—there’s a shape and size for every space.
Next the neophyte rose buyer has to decide what species or variety to choose. Navigating the thicket of options is a bewildering exercise, one that requires considerable study and deliberation, professional help or a sharp pin. Four basic groups define the genus: species roses, antique roses, early nineteenth-century hybrids, and modern roses. Within each of the first three groups there are up to as many as two dozen different families of rose, and within those families, more roses. In the last group, modern roses, the division is enormous, resulting in many thousands of varieties.
Kingston had spent several weeks ruminating over his choice of roses for Wickersham. There was no shortage of space for planting so the starting list was lengthy. Winnowing down the candidates had been both a trial and a pleasure. Adding names and crossing them off conjured memories of garden visits past. He could picture the lovely single Gallica, ‘Complicata,’ threading its joyful way up through the branches of the old apple tree at Graham Stuart Thomas’s rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey and the exuberant Rosa felipes ‘Kiftsgate’ zooming fifty feet into the copper beech at the charming Gloucestershire garden after which it was named.
The few pictures they had of the original rose garden at Wickersham all showed a typical layout. Orderly beds, some surrounded with low clipped box hedges, filled with nothing but regimented rows of roses. Kingston abhorred this kind of municipal garden look, judging the practice barely one step above the use of multicoloured bedding plants designed to replicate the union Jack or the city name.
The new rose garden at Wickersham would be one of the few areas that didn’t mirror its predecessor. Roses would be mixed in with shrubs, perennials and other plants, allowing them to show off their individuality and form, a technique now in common practice as exemplified at the garden at Sissinghurst. He was, however, going to make one small concession, in recognition of Britain’s celebrated rose hybridizer, David Austin, who created an entirely new category of roses known worldwide as English Roses. In any gardener’s dreams, the perfect rose would combine beauty of form, subtlety of colour, irresistible fragrance, resistance to disease and, above all, the ability to flower repeatedly. Such are the roses of David Austin. And Kingston was going to showcase them.