I'm sure you do if you know European roses, because it is one of the oldest and best-known of all old European garden roses. Can you guess which before I tell you?

Offley is the Apothecary's Rose, and here is how it also came to be known as the Offley rose.

The year was 1781 and British soldiers were closing in on Yorktown. Then Governor Thomas Nelson had built a house at Offley in Hanover County (about 70 miles from Yorktown) as a safe retreat for his family. As the British troops came closer, Mrs. Governor Nelson began preparing to take her ten children (the 11th was born in 1782) in her carriage to Offley. Before she left, however, she remembered her rose, "Oh," she said, "I must get my rose--otherwise the soldiers might trample it." This is how the Apothecary's Rose came to Offley and why, nearly 250 years later, it is still known in Hanover County as the Offley Rose.

I have it in my garden, though exactly where it is at this point, I cannot quite say because when I first became interested in roses, I bought Officinalis from Monticello and since then I was given an Offley rose by a friend and half a dozen pots of Apothecary's from another Hanover garden, all of which perhaps were Offley roses, too. They have long since jumped out of their pots and run wild among the other Gallicas.

So Offley is a familiar rose with a not-so-familiar local history.

Lindsey