What a wonderful way it was to celebrate the arrival of
spring! In a cemetery.
To
be more specific, in the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery, on Broadway between Ninth
and Twelfth Streets. No, I wasn’t celebrating the dead; I was celebrating
antique roses.
In 1850 the famous founding father of our
capitol city, John Sutter, donated ten acres as burial grounds for the rapidly
growing town around Fort Sutter. In those days, it was
becoming common to think of cemeteries also as gardens, and as gardens the
fashion of the times was to plant roses on and/or beside the graves.
At the time, roses were coming into their
own in the United States. Tea roses and China roses had been introduced
not long before and had quickly made their way from England and the Continent to our
shores. Gold diggers and other early Californians ordered roses from back east
and from Europe. In short time, those
roses, now considered antiques, were gracing the graves of Sacramento’s City Cemetery. Neglected for years, they
thrived nonetheless.
On April 12th the cemetery was
open to tours for an entire sunny morning and early afternoon. The woman who
led the tour I took was a rosarian aflame with rose-love. As
she led the group from family plot to family plot, often so festooned and laden
with rose bushes that no grave was clearly visible, she spoke of the rose’s
scent and color, its parentage and other history, its growing habits, and so
on. We were listening to a book.
What did I see there? The beautiful survivors.
A number of sprawling Duchesse de Brabant, an old shell-pink Tea rose of 1857;
the blood-red Cramoisi Superieur, a China rose of 1832 or 1837 (no one is quite
sure), so established in our state now as to be almost a native plant; the
almost forgotten rose Hoffman von Fallersleben, a Hybrid Musk, a ruffled light
pink beauty that grows eight to twelve feet; Monsieur Tillier (1891), an
extraordinarily fragrant orangey-pink Tea rose that ages to violet red or even
brick red. And there were so many others: Perle d’Or, Reve d’Or, Paul Neryon,
Monsieur Boncenne, as well as the two budded cuttings I bought for only $10.00
each: Duc de Cambridge, a crimson-mauve heartthrob of 1800 which I’d never seen
before and HAD to own; and another stranger to me, the little known Joasine
Hanet, a Hybrid Musk of 1847, a rich pink that blooms profusely in spring and
again in the fall. One rose, a Lady Banks, had climbed, lo, these many years,
40 or 50 feet into a pine tree—an astonishing sight! Imagine a dark green giant
trailing a white chenille shawl from shoulder to ground.
The tour is an annual event. If you love
roses, and especially if you delight in old roses—or just want to know more
about them—you should consider attending the tour next spring. In addition to selling cuttings of these old
roses, some of them quite rare, at least in this country, the Heritage Rose
Group and the committee that sponsor the tour also run a raffle and a silent
auction; best of all, knowledgeable rosarians are seated or milling about everywhere
to answer your questions and lead you to the very roses you may be asking
about. I’ve never seen a cemetery so alive!
--Darrell g.h.
Schramm
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