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Peter D. A. Boyd
Scots Roses, Scotch Roses, Burnet Roses
- by any other name would smell as sweet!
Peter D. A. Boyd
Web version of
BOYD, P.D.A. 2003. Scots Roses, Scotch Roses, Burnet Roses - by any other name would smell as sweet!. NCCPG Shropshire Branch Spring Newsletter 2003 National Council for Conservation of Plants and Gardens
Semi-double Scots Rose with some marbling on the petals. Photo: Peter Boyd
Scots Roses are cultivars of Rosa pimpinellifolia (sometimes known by the older name of Rosa spinosissima). Last Spring, I wrote a short article about Scots Roses also known as 'Scotch' Roses or Burnet Roses for the Shropshire NCCPG newsletter. Since then my own collection has grown, particularly through collecting in Scotland, bringing it to about 100 cultivars plus hundreds of seedlings that I have grown from collected heps.
Some of my seedlings will flower for the first time this year. My efforts at growing seedlings in hundreds compared with the thousands that commercial growers raise to produce new rose varieties may appear pitiful but I am raising seedlings from old varieties that are themselves rare. I consider that I am helping to reinvigorate a genetic pool that has not been dipped into for nearly 200 years. I hope to reproduce some of the old colour forms and get clues to parentage of the old cultivars. Anyway – it is fun and I am quite excited to see what I get this year!
The current edition of the RHS Plant Finder lists about 20 cultivars of Rosa pimpinellifolia including several modern 20th century hybrids. I am most interested in those that are close to the original Rosa pimpinellifolia in character. Some large-flowered modern hybrids like the Fruhlings series may be beautiful roses but they do not have the character of Scots Roses.
However, if you are tempted to order some Scots Roses, 'be warned' that the naming of Rosa pimpinellifolia cultivars is a mess. Even though you order different names from different nurseries, you may get the same cultivar under different names. In other cases, if you order the same name from different nurseries, you may get different cultivars. If you are very unlucky, having ordered a particular cultivar from a nursery that you know stocked the real thing, you may receive the wrong thing because nurseries may buy plants in from another nursery if they run low on a cultivar and, as a result, unknowingly sell the wrong thing. I have suffered from all these possibilities!
Some Scots Roses are misnamed because someone has tried to give a name to a rose based on an inadequate old description. If someone is not aware how many cultivars did exist, they may be tempted to 'fit' a plant into one of the few names mentioned in modern rose books. Some names are perfectly accurate in their way but 'Double Pink' may cover dozens of different and quite distinct cultivars. The naming of other roses is even more 'strange'. For example, the name 'Mary Queen of Scots' is in commerce as a plant with very distinct double purple flowers with pale backs to the petals and as a plant with single pale pink flowers irregularly marked with darker pink - the two could not be more different. However, of course, there is also more than one cultivar with double purple flowers with pale backs to the petals, some of which are not as good as what I personally consider to be the true 'Mary Queen of Scots'. Nothing is simple!
So what of the origin of named cultivars? There is a story that 'Mary Queen of Scots' is associated with the woman of that name who lived in the 16th century. There is, in fact, little evidence that any double forms of Rosa pimpinellifolia were known in cultivation before the very end of the 18th century (although I suspect that there could have been a double white form). However, within a few years after 1800, hundreds of double forms were produced. Joseph Sabine provides the first account of the origin of double 'Scotch Roses', published in the Horticultural Society of London Journal in 1822. He wrote:-
"Amongst the modern additions to the ornaments of our gardens, the varieties of Double Scotch Roses stand deservedly very high in estimation; their beauty is undisputed, and as they come into flower full three weeks before the general collection of garden Roses, they thus protract the period of our enjoyment of this delightful genus. On the British collector's notice they have an additional claim, being almost exclusively the produce of our own country; for of the many kinds that I have observed there are only three which can by any possibility be supposed to have originated out of Great Britain".
"The first appearance of the Double Scotch Roses was in the nursery of Messrs. Dickson and Brown (now Dickson and Turnbull) of Perth, between twenty and thirty years since. I am indebted to Mr Robert Brown, one of the partners of the firm at the above period, for the following account of their origin. In the year 1793, he and his brother transplanted some of the wild Scotch Roses from the Hill of Kinnoul, in the neighbourhood of Perth, into their nursery garden: one of these bore flowers slightly tinged with red, from which a plant was raised, whose flowers exhibited a monstrosity, appearing as if one or two flowers came from one bud, which was a little tinged with red: these produced seed, from whence some semi-double flowering plants were obtained; and by continuing a selection of seed, and thus raising new plants, they in 1802 and 1803 had eight good double varieties to dispose of; of these they subsequently increased the number, and from the stock in the Perth garden the nurseries both of Scotland and England were first supplied".
Sabine ascertained that the first eight double varieties were "the small white, the small yellow, the lady's blush, another lady's blush with smooth foot-stalks, the red, the light red, the dark marbled, and the large two-coloured". The adjective 'pink' was not used.
In about 1805, Robert Austin of Austin and McAslan, Glasgow nurserymen, obtained plants from the Perth nursery and, by about 1820, had raised about 100 new varieties of double Scots Roses. By the mid 1820s, Robert Austin had raised and offered for sale over 200 varieties. Similarly, London nurserymen (most of whom were Scots at that time) and others had obtained the Perth varieties and by the end of the 1820s it was reported that "some hundreds of new varieties have flowered from seedling plants in the Hammersmith nursery [Lee], and will soon be found in the sale catalogues".
In my quest for the names and descriptions of old varieties, I have traced two copies of Austin and McAslan's list from about 1825 (210 cultivars), an Edinburgh firm of 1827 (about 100 cultivars) and later lists published in various contemporary books but the rose lists of Lee and other London nurserymen of the 1820s and 1830s have apparently not survived.
However, the method of naming Scots Roses was inconstant at the time of their greatest expansion in numbers of cultivars. Nurseries gave names to their new creations and many of these names lack descriptions. Sabine favoured the use of descriptive names. He grouped 26 cultivars into seven sections and considered that all the other forms known at the time of writing his paper (1822) were insufficiently different to merit separate attention. Sabine's sections were:-