About 30 years ago I spotted this beautiful dark red rose growing in a front yard in town. It was DEFINITELY not a hybrid tea! I talked with the old lady who owned it, who told me that if her husband were still living, they'd have been married 50 years. When he was a teenager, he and his father were logging in Overton county TN, and found an abandoned log cabin with this rose growing beside it. He dug some for his mother, and gave his bride a start when they got married. I'm figuring it's been 30 years since she told me that, and they'd been married 50 years, and he found it before then. So let's guess he found it in 1945, at an ABANDONED log cabin. Which to me implies it had had at least 10 years to grow there. So what was this 1861 rose doing in the middle of nowhere, in a VERY poor region of the country in 1935??? I mean, we are talking 100+ miles from Nashville TN. It's not a flat place by any means, there are none of the "slave walls" that characterize the plantation areas of western and middle Tennessee. Anyway, by the time it could possibly have gotten to the USA, the plantation owners were impoverished.

I think I've figured it out though. During the Roaring Twenties, a WHOLE LOT of moonshine went from Tennessee to Chicago and Detroit. Some moonshiners got very, very, very rich. Moonshining is something you need to do a long way away from the beaten path, in some secret hollow. I think some moonshiner wanted to get his mama a really really nice gift while he was up in Chicago one time. So he bought her a super nice expensive rose bush that she could grow for herself and enjoy for years to come. But then, alas, Prohibition ended and times got hard. All that income from the big city ended, and when mama died the remote cabin was abandoned.

I spent years wondering about this rose, but only when I had a good strong plant myself to observe was I able to weed out most ot the contenders. It does fit the description of "Prince Camille de Rohan" very well. The flowers are well scented, but not that damask soapy scent like Etoile de Holland. It is thorny and prickly both and the long branches flop over. The flowers are a good deep velvety red to start, but can turn very dark in bright sunny weather. They are flat old style but not packed full of petals like Baronne Prevost.

One of the things I like best about this plant is it's leaves. I can't help it, they are just so different from the other roses I have and that I see around. They are dark green, rather shiny, narrow, and look to me a lot like tea roses I have seen in the past. They have some of the look of leaves on my 'Gardenia', which is a tea x wich, but smoother edged. Trying to find good pics of rose leaves is frustrating, no one was thinking of leaves for ID purposes while they were aiming their cameras.