Thanks for the kind remarks! For your amusement, here are two pictures of my garden from around 1911/1912. The baby is my husband's Aunt, who died a few years ago at over 90. The man holding the baby in one picture is my husband's great grandfather, who really formed the garden - when they moved in in 1905 it was a complete blank, nothing - so you can see how much he got accomplished in just 6-7 years. You can see that there are roses on either side of the driveway, and of course look at that huge hybrid tea in the second picture. They hybrid tea is long gone - that area is now lawn, but it is possible that some of the other roses are still here.

Jackie

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Jackie, it's extraordinary that this garden
A. Still exists, and
B. Exists, as well, in contemporary photos.

Just HOW rare is this???? Anyone know?

I don't know of any Western cemeteries which still have a LOT of roses.
I know one which still has a good many of them -- but roses in that cemetery have disappeared even in the last decade, and they continue to disappear.
I know of one or two old homes that have quite a few roses, but overall, I'd say that Jackie's is very very uncommon.

A certain former San Jose nurseryman used to say that "Gardens don't long survive them as made 'em." For the most part, I think he was correct in that.

Jeri

Jeri - I think if you looked in England, or Europe, or even the US East Coast you might find some. It is a matter of the HOUSE staying in the same family for several generations, and also of course the owners having an interest in gardening. In our case, my husband's ancestors immigrated from Germany on both sides of the first generation, and then his grandfather also married a lady from a German immigrant family. I mention this because those families: 1) were all gardeners - they did it themselves, even though they could have afforded to hire others to do it, and 2) were very "small c conservative" - they believed in keeping the plants, trees, etc that their ancestors planted - they were considered to be valuable BECAUSE their ancestors planted them. They were not interested in tearing everything out and starting over, as some gardeners are. Every season I marvel at what that first generation accomplished - the large trees & ancient shrubs in our garden take turns blooming, which is I am sure the original intent. It took me several years to figure that out, of course!

Jackie

I've thought about joining the garden history society. We'd have to Google to get the right name. They even have field trips to historic sites. I imagine finding an entirely intact old garden is very difficult. The Korbel garden near Guernville, Ca. is interesting. When Phillip Robinson was working there he found a number of old roses and other plants and then with the help of old drawings worked to restore the original garden. In Mendocino you can pick up a walking guide to old roses at the Kelly House Museum. I don't think any of those gardens are as they were but many of the original roses are there.
Jackie, I love the photos!

Rosefolly,
I have a friend in Northern California that visits this forum from time to time....Damascena is her name here, I belive. She grows what she refers to as an heirloom garden, from her OGRs down to her heirloom tomatoes. All organic, all beautiful. She lives on a ranch and has been there for many years.

Mendocino Rose, I would love to know more about the garden history society, and I would also love to see some of those gardens you describe.

Flaurabunda, please do tell your friend Damascena about this thread. It would be wonderful if she could join in.

Jackie, I do think you are right about a house staying in a family being the key to a garden surviving. I'm pretty sure that none of our children will want to stay here after we are gone, so my garden is toast.

Rosefolly

Not exactly the same thing...but I've been wondering how many have an heirloom garden with old roses and other perennials, that would have been popular 80-100 years ago. Maybe in a more classic layout, popular back in the 1900-1930 era?

Jackie's right -- The key is a home that remains in a family for multiple generations -- and in today's United States, that's rare. Particularly if you add to it the sort of conservatism that elects to keep the plants that are on site, rather than replacing them with the newest and shiniest.

Jeri

There are still a number of original owners here, or those which appear to have remained in the family. It's fairly easy to tell. Once the house changes hands, all but one wall is frequently knocked down and a "Mc Mansion" erected containing that wall so it's a "remodel" instead of new construction. Most of the area was originally large parcels. It's easy to tell the sub divided ones because the street has to be widened to current codes and sidewalks installed. The area is a hodge podge of narrow and wider, with and without side walks.

I've often wondered what kinds of treasures still grow behind the high hedges and original walls. Some of these places were new in the mid 1920s, with most dating a decade or a little more, later. They were expensive to buy into originally, so there should have been the ability to plant neat things. Kim

Knoxville has one, and it's all but unknown.
The house is about 1910, one of the stone houses that had a folly and some walls. Its water feature is no longer allowed by city code without a high fence.
I got to visit it because they were wondering about the roses: the roses all had a similar look to them that suggested early 1900s. Ramblers that were doing ok without care and some rugosa crosses. The one white rugosa like just seemed from its place in time (rose time) to be a W. van Fleet. So when I got home, I did some searches and I'm pretty sure its one of his.

The garden is about 25' by 30' and is about to outlive the trees on adjoining lots that have been shading it out for several decades.

There's a rumor of a house/farm up in the Cumberland Mountains that is a jumble of ramblers, but I can't find anyone who can give good directions. Or even narrow it down to a county or three. At least two people have seen it when they were driving around lost.

I think we often want the roses to present themselves quickly. It doesn't happen that way. It may take the death of many trees or a barn falling down for the roses to again bloom exuberantly.

Yes, it's extremely rare I'm sure, since people move so much.

My grandmother's garden was at least 50 years old when she died and I would have loved to have kept it intact, but none of her offspring wanted the house, and I couldn't move across country to take it on either.

Anyway the new owners are remodeling the house somewhat but have not (yet) done any remodeling of the garden, beyond pruning back the horribly overgrown azaleas along the foundation - picture azaleas as high as the house eaves. My aunt visits once in a while and she sent me photos. I had planted a redwood tree for my grandmowther back in the 90s and of course no one in Alabama knows what a redwood tree is! so they were asking my aunt what it was and she had to ask me. They grow wide and squat in that climate, rather than tall. But this is rare, for new young owners to keep, let alone rehabilitate, an old overgrown neglected garden - my grandmother wouldn't let anyone do anything in the garden, even when she was unable to do it herself. She didn't grow roses but there's azaleas and camellias from the 40s and 50s, seedlings from local nurserymen.

Here in Olympia Washington, we have what is the oldest house in town, and that was in the family from construction in the 1850s up until a few years ago. It is now owned by a historical preservation foundation. They focus on the house itself, but there are a few original garden plants and some old photos. There are a lot of older roses, mostly teas and early hybrid teas. But, the family had had the roses planted scattered throughout the lawn, or big ramblers on the house itself, and the foundation felt compelled to dig up and move all the roses to preserve the house paint work and to make lawn mowing easier. I'm working on getting the rose society (I'm current president) to work with the foundation on identifying and caring for the old roses. We have written records of a Talisman rose being planted in the front lawn in 1930 for the wedding of the last couple to live in the house, and people who remember seeing it, but it apparently did not survive being dug up and moved, 'cause none of the surviving roses are Talisman. Sure we can buy another Talisman, and yes technically it's the same rose since they're all clones, but it isn't the same, you know?

We think this is not only the oldest house in town, but the oldest intact rose collection too. I'm not sure I'd call it the oldest rose garden since everything's been dug up and shoved into cramped beds to make room for the lawn mower. But the house is protected, and the foundation wants to work on the garden too and has asked us at the Rose Society for help. There are other old houses in town, but few have any original plantings beyond a large apple tree or a clump of seriously overcrowded former potted christmas trees. No roses even when there's written records of a rose garden originally. And a lot of old roses in people's gardens turn out to be rootstock.

I'm looking for a house to buy myself, and I look at a lot of older homes on larger lots, and a lot of them either have no landscaping at all, or too-large trees that were planted in bad locations. I'm sure they were cute when they were planted but it's 50 or 100 years later now and they're too big for their location. The other common one is huge rhododendrons planted right against the house, causing rot and termite damage, or more aggressive shrubs whose roots are cracking the foundation or branches damaging the roof. That's another reason old plantings don't survive ownership changes, poor landscape design.

And of course whole neighborhoods of older gardens get bulldozed for new subdivisions. Sometimes very old garden plants can get protection as historical, we have one downtown, a very old rose that's unidentified, but the city has protected it as a historic plant. It could well have been brought over the Oregon Trail. When construction was planned right next to it the city had it roped off, and the construction crew kept it safe. It's huge, and covered with pink flowers every June, a bright spot surrounded by parking lots.

Newly published is "One Writer's Garden, Eudora Welty's Home Place," which tells the story of the garden life of the southern writer, Eudora Welty, and her mother, Chestina. The garden has been restored based on long conversations between one of the authors, Susan Haltom, and Eudora Welty, before her death, and her letters and garden journals, both her own and her mother's.

The Welty home is in Jackson, Mississippi. Here's a short quote from one of the letters Eudora Welty wrote to a friend in 1946.

"Our whole southern rose problem is that down here people have obeyed
without question the rules laid down by the Rose people of Harrisburg and
the North in general, low pruning, grafted stock, etc., whereas Mother and
some people have always held, down here we can get roses ... to be
everblooming as they were in the old days by simply not pruning them
severely. .. why do we try to ape the cold climates?

I'm ordering the old-fashioned rose catalogue from Bobbink & Atkins if
they still have it, and hope to reinstate Lady Hillingdon and the Duchesse
de Brabant and the Maman Cochets we've lost through the years -- instead
of The Doctor which is so beautiful but hard for us to grow. Have you that
one? "

Eudora had a friendship with Elizabeth Lawrence, the gardener and author from North Carolina as well, and there are tidbits about their gardening friendship and trading plants, slips, seeds, bulbs. My heart skipped a beat as I went through this section as I've read some of Elizabeth Lawrence's work and really enjoyed it.

The book is full of photographs, both old and new, snippets from Eudora's stories, plant lists, sketches of the gardens as they were and photographs of the gardens as they have been restored. If you're interested in southern garden history, I think you'd like the book. Or if you like Eudora Welty, Henry Mitchell, Elizabeth Lawrence, you'll enjoy this glimpse into Eudora's life in her mother's garden, which became her own. Or if you want a look at a period of American history in which gardening important part of life, you might enjoy this too.

And here's another quote I like:

"Weeding is good for you," Miss Welty once told me (the author, Susan Haltom). "It's not an emergency. You must be patient and calm" ...

and this:

"Many people wonder if a garden is meant to live on after its creator.
Of course we recognize that things can never truly stay the same,
since a garden exists in time, with tree canopy changes and alterations
in the beds and borders. But meaning, in a garden, goes deeper than mere
decoration or the plants themselves, and that is why I wanted to share this garden's story.

Finding meaning may also take time. As Henry Mitchell once described Miss
Welty's work: "Her art, after all, appears always to have been aimed at grand
simplicities, not usually found at the first flirtation with a typewriter, but not
all that complicated, either. It takes years, perhaps, to learn what is simple
and what is right."'

Miss Welty died in 2001; the restoration work was completed after her death and the gardens and home are now open to the public. I've read a little of Miss Welty's work; this book has made me want to go back and read more of it.

Heirloom gardening was a bit of a craze here in the 90's but, as so often happens, definitions sort of got in the way. For many people, this means using only indigenous plants whuile for others, they pick a notional period, say 100 years ago, and only grow plants which were in commerce or at least in general horticultural use at that time. I personally find this anathema - I like to look forward when gardening and one of the most souless processes to come out of horticulture has been the garden restoration movement where plants featured in the original deign are faithfully replanted as a sort of snapshot. Ghastly. boring, contrived. And I must be clear, this is most definately not like Jaqueline's lovely garden which has clearly grown, changed and been loved and used for this time, not preserved in aspic. I love new themes, ideas and new plants. Yep, history has a place but not in a garden, thank you. Oh, and don't get me started on the heirloom veg fad - many of which are disease magnets. Older is not always best (and I know I am risking it, posting on this forum but.....)

I think, you put your finger on it, Suzy, there's a difference between the continuity of a garden for the love of a garden and family and the marketing of what is old as something new. I've seen the heirloom craze in plants here too; sometimes it's just more marketing, don't you think?

None of my older children have an interest in gardens or in roses, but they've all seen me garden since they were little. I hope that even though my personal garden won't endure past my own life, they themselves will find the beauty of having your hands in the dirt and growing something.

What's important to me is not the endurance of my garden, but that when given the right opportunities in their lives, they will also plant and garden and make a home that includes flowers and plants for themselves and their children. Jackie's husband is fortunate to have a wife that can see the value of what is there in that garden; in other hands, it might have all been torn down and planted with beds of hypertunias and miscanthus.

For a long time I have been wanting to move to a smaller place eventually, more in a walkable town and perhaps with a bit more rainfall. I can see a time when this garden will become too much for me. The idea of a garden I can still manage when I am a less active is very enticing. Now I'm rethinking. If I stay here longer, then this garden will survive longer. I know no one will want to tend it when I leave. I thought I was okay with that, but I'm coming back to think about that again.

Food for thought.

Rosefolly

Gean, whether your children express an interest in gardening now or not, they may well come to value it later. In all the years I have been involved in wholesale and retail nurseries, I've encountered many who walked in to learn how to grow things and buy things they remembered their parents growing. Many have expressed regret at not paying more attention when they could have. Some have complained they would never be interested, particularly in roses, because of being forced to deal with them against their will as kids. I can understand that as it's my feeling about lawns, ANY lawn. I just won't have one for any reason. Hated them as a teenager forced to maintain my dad's, I hate them now.

There is hope for your kids, though. Keep sharing information with them and letting them witness your joy in what you grow. It will stick with them in ways you don't yet understand. Too often, it comes back to "infect" them after it's too late for them to ask you for your help, but I've seen it happen many, many times.

I understand your sentiments, rosefolly. I'd been blessed to have a large space in a planned community made available to me for eighteen years, complete with water. I made GOOD use of it, taking my "collection" of 300 roses moved from this valley to the next to over 1200 in a short time. It WAS wonderful and allowed me to explore and learn much. But, those can easily become like sacred vows which become overwhelming. There is real grief when something requires you dismantle them, but, like an over due death, there is also great relief and wonderful memories. The hardest part is realizing what is to come and taking the proper steps to downsize what you have to a more manageable size with more suitable plants.

I've seen it happen time after time. A wonderful garden is created, tended, loved, only to have it disappear virtually over night once new owners take possession of the property. No matter how beautiful or rare, people want to put their stamp on their new property. I've also seen the regret that's come from too quickly destroying what existed before learning what was there. Spread what you have around as far as possible. Donate things you find you can live well without to your local societies for their auctions and raffles. Trim down what you have to maintain so it's too easy now. The day is too quickly approaching where even that will seem too much. Kim

I can definitely understand why people are drawn to heirloom gardens, old garden roses, an old fashioned style of gardening, etc.

In this country modern "growth" usually has meant suburban sprawl, big box stores, car-centric lifestyle, McMansion housing etc. When I think "modern" I don't always think progressive. Sometimes I'm almost glad the housing market collapsed.

For us, since we've moved out to the farm (originally owned by my husband's grandparents) it's been fun planning the gardens to include what might have been popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Although I do have a few newer roses, most are OGRs and hybrid musks, with a few floribundas, rugosas and Canadian explorer roses. That being said, they all look like they are old style roses, at least to me...although I did sneak in a few yellow knock out roses, but since they turn pale ivory with pink edges, they just blend in with the gallicas and other roses.

For the perennials, it's mostly herbs (including Hidcote lavender and bee balms) and lots of daisies, butterfly bushes, coneflowers and peonies, with a big lilac hedge along one side of the property. We also add stock, cosmos, snapdragons and some zinnias and marigolds for annual interest...and the purple hyacinths and pink tulips look great with the hundreds of yellow daffodils, that have nauturalized all around the farmhouse. When you start with so many older flowers, many that just appear in the spring, it's fun to try to fill in the gardens, with plants that might have been around at that time.

While the layout is actually rather formal, with the mixture of color and texture, no one seems to notice. They mostly say they like how balanced and pretty everything is, without looking too stiff. I take that as a compliment :)

Those photos are marvelous, Jackie, thank you for sharing them!

I'm the second generation to take care of this garden. Mom started it in July of 1954 so it's 57 years old. Of her original plantings I still have a lilac, forsythia and 2 weigelas and her beloved Pinocchio rose. But she was never one to be satisfied with a garden so she moved and changed things around herself many times over the years. But I doubt there'll be anyone taking it over after I'm gone. I don't have any kids and I doubt they'd want this small, old house if I did. It's definitely no McMansion like everyone seems to want these days thanks to TV.

mmmm sounds lovely, LL. My dad used to call such gardens 'bosky) - a bit wild, a bit planned, lots of green and definately lots of life. I would say that anyone who gardens with children, no matter how disinterested they may be, a kind of osmosis goes on and a feel for gardening is attaching itself to muscles and neurons, maybe subliminally but effectively. The pleasure, if not the actual practice, is a guaranteed outcome, as with children who grow up with art, music, kindness and other good things.