y years, the rapid advance is nothing less than
astonishing. Our own veteran growers and some of the foreign firms seem
to have vied with each other in producing new forms in the Hybrid
Perpetuals and in the Teas, but it has been almost within the last
decade that growers have not only deepened the interest in the
cultivation of the Rose, but have immensely widened it by striking out
in new directions.

It is now many years since the late Henry Bennett raised such lovely
hybrids as Grace Darling and Mrs. John Laing, but the parents of these
were still among the well-known H.P.'s and Teas and Chinas. But of late
years hybridists have taken in hand some of the handsomer of the
species, and by working them with well-established favourites have
produced whole new ranges of fine Roses. Of these the most prominent
have been products of _R. multiflora_, _rugosa_, _rubiginosa_, and
_wichuraiana_. The striking success of many of these later hybrids is
encouraging in the highest degree, and the field for future work is so
immense that the imagination can hardly grasp the extent of the prospect
that these earlier successes seem to open out.

There are so many ways in which Roses may be beautiful. Even in the
varied form and habit possessed by the types some special kind of beauty
is shown and some special garden utility is foreshadowed. And then we
think of the future possibilities of the Rose garden! Already--we say it
with deliberation and a feeling of honest conviction--the Rose garden
has never been developed to anything like its utmost possible beauty.
The material already to hand even twenty years ago has never been
worthily used.

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.