The Rose garden to be beautiful must be designed and planted and tended, not with money and labour and cultural skill only, but with brains and with love, and with all those best qualities of critical appreciation--the specially-cultured knowledge of what is beautiful, and why it is beautiful--besides the indispensable ability of the practical cultivator.
There are in some places acres of Rose gardens, many of them only costly expositions of how a Rose garden had best not be made. The beautiful Rose garden, that shall be the living presentment of the poet's dream, and shall satisfy the artist's eye, and rejoice the gardener's heart, and give the restful happiness and kindle the reverent wonderment of delight, in such ways as should be the fulfilment of its best purpose, has yet to be made.
It matters not whether it is in the quite free garden where Roses shall be in natural groups and great flowery masses and arching fountains, and where those of rambling growth on its outskirts shall clamber into half-distant surrounding trees and bushes, or whether it is in the garden of ordered formality that befits a palatial building; there are the Roses for all these places, and for all these and many other uses. Indeed, for reducing the hard lines of the most formal gardens and for showing them at their best, for such enjoyment as they may give by the humanising of their rigid lines and the softening of their original intention as a display of pomp and state and the least sympathetic kind of greatness, the beneficent quality of age and accompanying over-growth may be best shown by the wreathing and clambering cluster Roses, whose graceful growth and tender bloom are displayed all the better for their association with the hard lines and rough textures of masonry surfaces.
No family of hardy shrubs is more bewildering in the multiplicity and intricacy of its nomenclature than Rosa. Although there are many species now accepted by botanists, yet the pseudo-specific names may be counted by hundreds. Fortunately for those interested in their cultivation, a good many of these names refer to plants with very unimportant distinctions (many of them, indeed, are minor forms of our native Dog Rose), and the best of the wild species are mostly grown under the names applied to them in the following notes.