The great floral designer Jennie Love, who I am fortunate to count as a friend, recently remarked that dahlias don’t belong in arrangements. She said this as we were gazing over her beautiful fields at sunset, glasses of sangria in hand. Long rows of dahlias, destined for wedding bouquets and celebratory arrangements, were spread out before us. “Dahlias should just be in a vase. By themselves.”

Her comment reminded me of my uneasiness with dahlias. Even a rose person like myself has to admit (reluctantly) that the dahlia may be the true queen of flowers. The clarity and saturation of its colors are unsurpassed. The size of the blossoms demands absolute respect, even genuflection.

Thank goodness dahlias have no scent, or my roses would be quaking in fear for their leggy, defoliated lives.

But like seashells taken home that never look as beautiful as they did on the beach, often when these breathtaking blossoms are cut from the stalk they seem to lose a little of their magic. Their charisma flags further in a mixed bouquet.

And so when I cut them, I’ve begun to keep them segregated from the zinnias, salvia, and ageratum in the vase on the kitchen table. Much better.

Instead of finishing an article that was due, I began looking at dahlia paintings on the internet. It appears that still life painters have long known the Rule of Dahlias.

If I were an art collector, I would start by building a collection of Russian flower paintings, like this one by Ilya Mashov, from the early 20th century.

The Impressionists liked dahlias, too. By themselves, in a vase.

Henri Fantin-Latour perhaps appreciated the dahlia the most. In the late 19th century he produced many flower paintings, a number of them portraying vases and baskets of dahlias.

Of course, every rule requires an exception. I may have only recently figured out what the painters knew long before me, and be done trying to get dahlias to fraternize well with other flowers.

But here you can see that nothing is impossible.

“I thank Lady Peter for the pear kernels & am often thinking what to send her for A requitall” 

Thus wrote the great American botanist John Bartram of Philadelphia to his English friend and business partner Peter Collinson on April 1, 1739.

Lady Petre (or Peter) was the wife of Lord Peter, a very wealthy young landowner who was Bartram’s angel investor in Europe. Before becoming connected with Lord Peter, Bartram had been struggling to succeed at his business endeavor, selling boxes of American bulbs, seeds, and plants to Europeans fascinated with the previously unknown species of the New World.

Imagine seeing a Southern Magnolia for the first time, or a Sugar Maple in blazing fall color. It’s hard to overestimate the plant lust these newly discovered species created on the parts of the landed gentry, many of whom had thousands of acres waiting to be naturalistically filled with plants in the then-popular English landscape style.

Occasionally Lord Peter would send Bartram a few things in return- the seeds from his wife’s favorite sugar pear among them.

By 1763 Bartram’s pear tree had borne fruit. This photo, taken at Bartram’s Garden in 1917, shows the Lady Petre Pear growing near the back door. I’ve come across a very few explanations why, but it was common to plant pear trees near the kitchen door, and the long lived trees are still seen in the backyards of some very old houses in Philadelphia and south of here.

The only other known mature Lady Peter Pear tree in America (and maybe anywhere) grows in my friend Joel’s beautiful garden in Germantown. It’s located on the site of the 18th century garden of Melchior Meng, who kept a botanical collection there. The tree, as custom dictates, is smack in front of the kitchen door. In this photo the door is hidden behind the trunk.

Joel knows how much I admire his tree, and this week he brought me four pears, before the squirrels chewed them. I haven’t tasted them yet, because I am still admiring their shape and color. Slightly larger than an egg, these pears are redolent of the 18th century.

One’s getting a soft spot, so I’ll probably try them tonight. You can be sure I’ll save the kernels, just like Lady Petre did. I’ll plant a few, and to honor tradition I’ll send some others in a tiny box to a friend who appreciates the story of this tree as much as I do.

UPDATE: I ate the pears. Either I’m a suggestible person, or this was the best pear I have ever had. Juicy and thin-skinned, the flavor was complex, and it wasn’t watery. More like a good apple, or even wine. And I did save the seeds.

My best recent exploration occurred when I drove up a steep and bumpy dirt road that hugged the side of a forested mountain. The little road twisted along for what seemed like an overly long time, considering how little there was along it. The thick canopy was broken only occasionally for clearings surrounding the few homes I passed. As a narrow-minded city person I couldn’t help but wonder, who would live all the way out here?

The road turned into a track, still navigable in four wheel drive for a little while more before becoming impassible. Where I stopped there was a low stone wall.

On the other side of the wall was a cellar hole, now just a depression. Foundation stones were tumbled around its bottom, which was partly covered over by a think layer of fallen leaves.

A little ways from the depression, located in what must have been a clearing once, were five small, rough, unmarked graves. Daylilies grew all around the markers, as did this rose.

The hands that planted and tended this rose have long been still, and the unmarked graves leave no clue as to who they were that lived and died here. Their home is gone, their fields returned to forest. The plants themselves are almost the only pieces of material culture left to bear their witness.

A house feels permanent, a person seems semi-permanent, and a garden feels ephemeral. But there must have been a point in time where one’s decay accelerated, while the others’ were stayed. I brought a little chunk of this rose back home with me, and I hope it survives. If it does, it will be a memento mori,  reminding me of the short durations of people, buildings, and tended spaces.

I don’t care that it was because the original speaker dropped out; I’ve been invited to speak about roses at the Woody Plant Conference taking place on July 25th. This is the biggest get-together of horticultural enthusiasts in the Mid-Atlantic region. I’ve gone to this conference for years, and even have a stack of the information folders they give out, because the speakers are always so interesting that at some point I usually want to go back and refer to something I learned there.

The organizers said I could speak about whatever rose-related topic I wanted, and my mind went about twenty directions at once. After some thought I decided to keep it simple, and talk about five wonderful antique roses that are beautiful, fragrant, underused, and completely sustainable.

Here’s a teaser.

Champneys’ Pink Cluster, the first American hybrid rose. A noisette, it is constantly in bloom and its fragrance seems especially strong in the autumn, when one plant can perfume a whole swath of a garden.

Stanwell Perpetual. Unusual foliage for an old rose (or a new one) Stanwell’s fernlike leaflets give it a delicate appearance all season long. The beautiful pale blush flowers appear all season as well, and have a strong fragrance for such a delicate plant.

A once bloomer, Bella Donna is one of the most fascinating, most alluring of all the thousands of varieties of old European roses. Of great antiquity, the fat buds open to the most luxurious quartered blossoms of true pink, with a heavy damask fragrance. The plant is covered with thousands of these gorgeous blooms, and in its glory it is an unforgettable sight.

Maybe I’ll write about the other roses I’m going to talk about in my next post. Or maybe I’ll talk about some of the excellent roses that I couldn’t squeeze into my presentation. On the other hand I could just give roses a break and tell you about the amazing $5.99 banana plants I got on sale yesterday in Lancaster County at an Amish nursery. Hardy to zone 7, they went into the long bed by the patio, the site of all my future luaus.

With plants, you can just keep talking.

Sometimes there seems to be an inverse ratio between how old a plant is and how much we know about it. The older the variety, the more its story is shrouded in the dusty rubble of antiquity and obscurity. This is very true of the European species the double cinnamon rose, R. cinnamonea flora pleno.

The rose appears listed in the most famous botanical treatise of the sixteenth century, John Gerard’s Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. The 1596 book was popular for over a century, and is a compendium of all the horticultural plants known in England at that time.

This pedigree does not seem to have brought the double cinnamon rose much respect in the ensuing four hundred years. Identified by its somewhat flat flower heads with exposed stamens and its curious shiny brown twiggy canes, it is a rose rarely cultivated, but found often in really old cemeteries throughout the Northeastern US. It must be tough, because it is often the only surviving rose in country graveyards like this one.

As for the name, it is sometimes posited that the flowers smell like cinnamon. I sniffed until I was lightheaded, but couldn’t get even the faintest whiff of spice. I favor the other theory, that the brown stems resemble the bark of the cinnamon tree.

We don’t know how this rose came to North America, but this flower pilgrim must have crossed over early, and probably often, to have found its way to so many remote places, where it has lingered unnoticed ever since.

For the past few years I’ve been collecting plants at old Vermont cemeteries and abandoned farms when I go on vacation. Usually what I collect isn’t in bloom, so it may be a year or two before I can time my visit to see a plant in flower in the garden I made up here.

The roses are colonizing this little collection garden. I’ve stuck about a half-dozen suckers in the ground here, and the ones that have taken are all the same type, one that I never could figure out.

This afternoon I had an extremely rare Eureka! moment when I finally figured out the name of the rose that I have collected all throughout Southern Vermont graveyards.

It’s Banshee, it’s old, it’s not uncommon, and its origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery. It seems to have been around since 1773, in Europe. It is thought to be a hybrid between the American R. virginiana and the European Damask rose. How these two roses had inter-continental relations in the 1700s is anyone’s guess.

At first look, this rose sends a wave of despair through a would-be rose sleuth. Its pale pink, very fragrant flowers look like so many others. It’s foliage is lighter green than one would expect, but not otherwise distinctive.

What makes this rose identifiable is the bud. The sepals are very long, twice the length of the flower bud. But it’s really the receptacle, or the swelling below the flower bud, that gives this rose away. In books it’s described as “acorn shaped” or “cup shaped”, whereas other roses have a much slimmer waistline separating the calyx and flower bud.

The other quality Banshee is known for is its reluctance to open properly. Some roses are prone to balling, as its called, usually if rain occurs just as the flower is opening. At least half of the flowers on my Banshees can’t open, even in fine weather. The flower petals stick together and go brown without ever blooming.

Case closed. Now if I can figure out the rose that’s growing in the hedge near the stream . . .

Extremely fragrant plants have always interested me. Partly this is for historical reasons. I love reading about how fragrant flowers were soaked in wine, stuffed into songbirds before roasting, made into poultices, chaplets, unguents, syrups, and otherwise utilized in concoctions many centuries ago.

I also love that fragrance is an entirely other realm beyond beauty. Some plants have one quality or the other, and a few have both. Jasmine is one of these plants. There are a few varieties which are hardy in the Northern garden, and these are not fragrant. The amazing ones have to be brought indoors in the winter, where they don’t exactly thrive, at least not for me. But spring comes just in time, and the withered plants are sent outdoors where they recover, and begin to bloom by the end of June.

The easiest and showiest is the Jasmine pictured above, which I’m going to call fragrant jasmine, because that’s how it’s referred to in the White Flower Farm catalog. I can’t figure out the Latin name, but maybe someone can help me out with this. Polyanthum?

But my favorite is the fussy Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose double ivory blossoms smell like jasmine tea. This image shows it just about to open, and I would have liked to get an image of it in full bloom but that would have meant postponing my vacation, which I considered, or bringing this large plant with me in the car, which I also considered. Reason eventually prevailed.

The most fascinating is the night blooming jasmine. Its tubular-shaped green flowers smell exactly like nothing all day long, but once night falls the fragrance is so strong one small branch can perfume a room, one plant a whole house. For some people this is too much fragrance, but not for me.

I’ve never been one for growing my own food, but this year I thought to put an unattractive and awkwardly located chunk of the yard somehow to use, and so we built raised beds. The plan was to join the legions of urban homesteaders that have already discovered the joy of the family vegetable plot.

I planted lettuce, which we ate. It was good. But somewhere in the second month we lost steam on the project, and then yesterday as I walked by I took a long look for the first time in awhile.

The plot is all flowers. I don’t know how it happened.

I had planted a few nasturtiums and some marigolds, because I think of them as vegetable garden flowers. Calendula flowers are edible, in theory. The bread seed poppies sounded like something fun to try, as did another packet of mixed variety poppies which I threw down. The antique sweet peas grow on a trellis. Since they don’t take up any space they don’t count.

Someplace underneath all this stuff is a row of unthinned carrots. The rosemary is still alive. Four unstaked tomatoes seem to be having a fine time, their indiscriminate sprawling side branches fraternizing with the blossoms.

Not for the first time, I failed as a vegetable gardener. But I did accidentally rediscover how much fun it is to grow flowers from seed.

A friend and I each have new gardens this year, and we’ve been going on some plant hunting trips together to complete our visions for the gardens we want.

She’s a minimalist for which every plant is deliberately chosen to fit with a predetermined design scheme of blue and white. She’s careful and not swayed by the impulse to make a purchase unless the plant is precisely what she’s looking for, down to the exact named cultivar.

And I, on the other hand, like it all. I’m not much of an editor when it comes to flowers. the only thing I’ve ripped out and disposed of recently were some carnations from the dollar table which opened the cheapest of cherry red.

Except for those red carns, there’s room for everybody here.

What I’ve noticed in designing is that very colorful and eclectic gardens look best if a little white is woven into the mix. An occasional pale bloom seems to pull together a garden, and adds a harmonizing effect. Surprisingly, white flowers actually seem to dial up the intensity and brightness of everything else.

This is true with flower arranging as well. Some crisp white filler flowers will make the rest of a bouquet even more effective.

I don’t love white- it’s not on my walls, not in my clothes closet- but I’ve come to appreciate its importance in the garden. And for an otherwise unrestrained gardener like myself, its calming presence is a good influence.

About ten years ago, a friend brought me a baggie of Opium poppy seeds from his garden in Birmingham, Alabama. “Just throw them on the ground and they’ll grow,” he advised in a slow Southern drawl.

I did, and they grew. But not well. I hadn’t dumped out that baggie in the smartest place. It wasn’t quite bright enough and there were too many other things already growing there. Each year a few seeds would germinate in that moist soil and eventually one or two anemic looking poppies would force out a flower before collapsing from failure to thrive. Efforts to transplant the seedlings to a more favorable location failed every time.

When I moved last year I took a couple of plants with me, including the great daylily ‘Mauna Loa’ which I couldn’t bear to leave behind. I replanted it on a steep, sunny slope with poor soil and hoped it would be tough enough to make it there.

This reveals how exciting my life is, but one of the best moments of the spring was the day I realized that a poppy seed had hitchhiked with the daylily and was growing like a weed. Lettuce-sized leaves started appearing as the plant grew to four feet, followed by at least eight buds. (Although I love flowers, you can see I am not obsessed enough to do more than estimate the number of buds on one plant.)

It’s open now, and it’s beautiful. Sound the horns for the triumphant gardener!

Then yesterday I was driving around looking for a parking spot when I was compelled to stop in the street and get out of the car. Suddenly my pride in that one self-sown flower seemed ridiculous.

Besides poppies of all kinds, this garden was filled with penstemon, bachelors buttons, larkspur, and other self-sowers.

It was a glorious sight to behold, and one impossible to think of begrudging.