BEAUTIES FROM DAYS GONE BY

Introducing the Roses Your Grandmother Loved

Antique roses are popular again (just look at the cover of most any issue of Victoria magazine), and there’s good reason for their newfound popularity.

The hybrid tea roses grown today are heir to so many bugs and diseases (black spot, red spider, mildew, aphids, thrips, rust) one needs an advanced degree in horticulture to keep them off life support. Not so with antiques.

Meet G. Michael Shoup. He does have an advanced degree in horticulture, (a Master’s from Texas A&M), but though he appreciates contemporary roses, Michael is an ardent cheerleader for another kind of rose, and it wasn’t born yesterday.

The rose that has captured Michael’s heart is not one rose but many classes of roses identified as antiques. These are the roses your grandmother grew, and her mother before her.

Some came across the plains in covered wagons, nurtured and shielded from harm by our ancestors; some arrived on the wings of birds; and some were provided by hardy nurserymen, who by the 1800’s had made their way west and established businesses to supply both farm and dooryard.

Oddly enough, Shoup did not start out to grow antique roses. His business began as a landscape nursery in 1976, which sold much the same familiar landscape plants as other nurseries in the area. But then came the Texas oil bust and, like so many other businesses in Texas in the 1980’s, the landscaping business was on the ropes. It was then that Michael decided to specialize in plants native to Texas.

But one day, when he was well into his native plant nursery business, one of his propagators showed him a beautiful yellow rose Shoup had never seen before. The man said he’d seen it growing on a fence near the side of the road and decided to take a few cuttings. Ah, The Yellow Rose of Texas, Michael thought to himself, and took it to a botanist at Texas A&M, who identified it as an antique rose called, “Mermaid.”

It was love, and thus the Antique Rose Emporium was born.

And from there, it really blossomed. The very idea of of having beautiful roses that are everblooming, disease resistant and fragrant (rather than the usual fussy hybrid teas) was like a fresh wind blowing through the soul of even the most casual gardener, and the popularity of these beauties soon took off.

Shoup acknowledges that the hybrid tea rose has its place. But, he says, “Ironically, roses today are not a garden-friendly plant. Breeders for the last one hundred years have concentrated on breeding for perfect flowers, but in so doing they took away their ability to survive. They created weaklings.”

He says that antique roses have been around all this time, just not where one would expect to look: in graveyards, abandoned homesteads, and stranded near freeways and along back roads. These are the kinds of treasures he and his fellow “rose rustlers” seek, and often find.

Their dedicated mission becomes then, “not one of pillage, but rather search and rescue.” The Texas Rose Rustlers always ask permission to take cuttings from the old roses they find, and if that is not forthcoming, they ask at least to weed around existing plants so they may continue to thrive.

“Now what we’re finding is the best of the best, much like, say, Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection in action. These are roses that people have passed down to one another over the years, and they have beauty, fragrance and diversity of form. People now get them to put into large areas—big sweeps of roses with perennials and annuals and woody plants as companions—not in sterile rows.”

The good news is that many old roses will grow despite a black thumb and benign neglect. After all, that’s what they’ve been doing for a century or so, without any help from humans.

Sometimes it’s more than difficult to identify antique roses, especially as they may not be in bloom when found, but any dedicated plant detective knows what to expect in the way of shape and gloss—or the lack of it—in rose foliage. Some leaves are deeply toothed and veined and some less so, some are pointed and some rounded, some are bright and some are dull. They may be light green, bright green, dark green, or tinged with red—this last especially when they first leaf out in spring.

Shoup’s website: has an online reference chart of the old roses they stock, and they stock countless varieties. In business for twenty-three years, the Antique Rose Emporium has two display gardens—one in Independence and one in San Antonio—and a mail-order catalog. Roses may also be ordered online, and are shipped October through May in 2 gallon containers, ready to plant.

The gardens feature hundreds of roses, perennials, herbs and native flora reflecting the personality of each location. Each site has herb gardens, cottage gardens and perennial borders, and all plants displayed in the gardens (as well as gift items) are also for sale.

Most old roses bloom throughout the spring to fall seasons, depending on location.

“Roses take a rest in the summer, just like we do. But in the fall, they put on another beautiful show,” says Shoup. “Fall is one of the most wonderful times in Texas, and (throughout) the South. In the Northwest and Northeast, roses bloom June through August, then they go dormant for the winter. We garden for spring and fall, and we advocate planting in the fall, so that you can have a beautiful flower garden in the spring.”

A few acres can yield a profusion of antique roses, and some make good cut flowers as well. Imagine a rambling rose hedge; a climbing bower of blooms; an English garden dotted with roses; a pergola; a trellis; an arched doorway; a rock wall adorned with blowsy blossoms.

According to Michael Shoup, most roses were primarily bred in Europe and brought to the United States by supply ships. They were imported in the mid-1800s especially, by strong nurserymen such as Thomas Affleck and William Watson (both from Washington County, Texas), who propagated and sold them.

Some came from as far away as China, where early botanists like Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) collected. Banks is best remembered for his voyage round the world with Captain Cook in that capacity, and the plant genus “Banksia,” which was named for him. Rosa banksiae (Lady Banksia), is just one lovely old rambling reminder of that trip.

Antique roses as a group are as carefree as roses get, but of course there’s a downside. (Isn’t there always?). That is, they must be pruned now and then. Unpruned, these vigorous growers will mature into Frankensteinian masses that threaten passersby.

Says Shoup, “Most all of them will get bigger, some of them very big. If you don’t train them, the branches come right off the plants and grab kids off bicycles. You need to be ruthless and harness your roses. Don’t let them harness you.”

The best guarantee of success in growing old roses is preparing the soil first. “Soil is everything,” says Shoup. “Roses need organic matter, so you will need to prepare the soil by tilling two to three inches of compost or other organic matter into at least six inches of soil.”

Then, add mulch.

“Mulching is critical because it provides nutrients to the living soil. We mulch twice a year just before the growth periods in spring and fall.”

Mulching is an important key to any successful garden. Not only does the mulch decompose gradually and constantly feed the soil, but it also has the endearing quality of keeping down weeds, not to mention preserving moisture. The gardener who mulches regularly will be lavishly rewarded with healthy blooms throughout the garden.

Antique roses need fertilizer of course to do their best, but as they have been doing well without human intervention for so many years, they don’t need much; in fact much less than it takes to coax bloom from hybrid teas.

And unlike many hybrid teas, which are grafted onto the root stock of often less appealing roses (and which have a nasty habit of sending shoots up from below the graft so that the originals take over the hybrids), antique roses grow on their own rootstock and will live unadulterated for fifty to one hundred years.

So don’t believe everything Gertrude Stein. has said. A rose may be a rose may be a rose, but an antique rose is a (nearly) carefree thing of beauty and a lifelong joy to behold.

©2006 Mary Lynn Archibald

NOTE: This article first appeared in ACRES magazine in Fall, 2005