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.

SOME BEAUTIFUL WILD ROSES

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.

Their cultivation is simple. They are like the Hybrid Perpetuals in
their love for a rich loamy soil--one inclining to a clayey rather than
to a sandy nature. Loving abundant sunlight, they are not happy in shady
spots. The commonest mistake in their cultivation is in pruning. The
notion that they have to be cut back like Hybrid Perpetuals and
such-like Roses has often resulted in the loss of a season's flowers,
besides destroying for the time the peculiar beauty of habit that many
species possess. The shoots, often long, sucker-like growths that push
from the base in summer, supply the flowers of the following year, and
until they have flowered should not be touched with a knife. Whatever
pruning is necessary--and it is, as a rule, a mere matter of thinning
out of old worn-out stems--is to give the young growths more air and
freedom. No shortening back is needed. It may always be remembered th