Eleven years ago, almost to the day, our good friend Anna called, “Come over this evening. I want to take you to visit a garden I’m looking after while the owners are away”. Anna knows a good thing when she sees it and has a nose for a too-good-to-miss moment. And it was exactly that. A perfect June evening with the sun still well above the tree tops and hours of daylight still ahead of us. After a short drive through dappled lanes we parked the car and walked along the rough, grassy track that led to the gateway at the beginning of a wood. We moved from the open ground and followed the now mossy track some considerable distance into the shadows. A series of glades began to open as we approached the house, which was nestled in a secret garden of wild and wonderful informality. An occupation of the wood and somewhere with a heightened mood that you might dream about, but rarely experience in reality.
My lasting memory, which has eclipsed the remembrance of more detail, was of the enormous stands of a silver-leaved rose, hunkered into the edges of the glades and scrambling into the trees. Bathed in the evening light that poured from the oculus in the glade and backed by the mysterious darkness of the wood, they glowed in their moment of June perfection. Still more bud than flower, the pale, ivory blooms lit up the approaching dusk. Although the owners were away, Anna said they would be more than happy for me to take a cutting (or two), for it would have been impossible to leave without a memento to mark what I already knew would be an indelible moment.
The cuttings took with ease, because Rosa soulieana has what you might call a lust for life and, by the next spring, I had half a dozen plants that were straining to get into the ground. Collected in 1895 in Western Sichuan province by the French missionary Soulié, read what you can about the rose and all accounts point to its vigour. Reaching 18m in height if allowed to ascend into a tree and as much as 3m high by 4 to 8m across as a free-standing shrub, this is not a rose for the fainthearted. But if you have the room, and we are daily thankful that we do, it is a rose I would not want to be without.
The still-fresh exuberance is particular to this side of the solstice and Rosa soulieana picks up momentum just as the dog roses in the hedgerows dim. Hedgerows scented by creamy elder and hogweed towering up to well over head height in the moist meadows. Where I have introduced Soulié’s Rose, they step through the rough meadow on the flank of The Tump, just beyond the giant presence of the gunnera and creamy Koenigia alpina. Here it is too nutritious to hope for finer detail, but moist enough for the horsetail and meadowsweet to reign. It flowers at the same moment as the poisonous Hemlock Water-Dropwort, which shows where the springs have broken ground and often, as today, the very week of a wet squall which will punch and flatten the meadows.
I placed the roses thirty or so paces apart so they have room to stand on their own and not become one impenetrable thicket. “Well adapted to a wild garden where they can be given unlimited room and never be touched by a knife”, is the advice of the trusted Trees and Shrubs Online. Despite their volume now, they hover in the long grasses that provide their breathing space. Later a stand of wilding hawthorn and cherry plum will flare alongside them with berries to sit with the rosehips in the autumn. They have great sprays of tiny orange fruits at the end of the season, but just now, go and stand amongst them, move into their clove-scented orbit and allow yourself to feel small. Humbled a little by their very lust for life, their grey, light-reflecting foliage and their ability to seize and heighten this moment.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 15 June 2024
