Where the Old Roses Grow - Book Review

Like many others, my love for and connection to Roses goes back a long way, and is well instilled within me. The front garden of my childhood home was a Rose Garden, and my Grand Parents grew Hybid Tea roses when they were fashionable in the 1950s.

My Nana had a beautiful wooden trellis which ran the length of her garden and this was where she grew climbing roses. Many of those roses, and the trellis, which is now over 80 years old, are in my own garden, and are a link back to the past and its precious memories for me.

When I moved into my present house which is over 400 years old, I set about restoring the garden with historic roses and traditional old fashioned cottage garden plants, and this was when I started to research and source Old Roses for myself.

Roses have gone full circle in my life and in the lives of many others too. Roses weave their way through life's ups and downs, providing something constant and of equisite beauty, with links to the past and hope for the future too. This connection to and love of Roses was what attracted me to this book when it first caught my eye on a bookshop shelf.

"Where the Old Roses Grow" is written by Janelle McCulloch. The cover suggests this is a book about "Vita Sackville-West and the Battle for Beauty during Wartime". In reality the book covers many more people than Vita - it remembers four or five people who each in their own way saved many of the old roses for us all to enjoy today - Vita Sackville West, Maud Messel, Constance Spry, Edward Bunyard and Graham Stuart Thomas.

The book begins with Vita Sackville West finding Sissinghurst, which was in a completely rundown state, and even referred to as a "dump". Vita had a vision, and more importantly the ability to follow that idea through. She first saw the house on 4 April 1930, and could never have realised how influential the garden would be not only on her own life, but in the world of horticulture for many years to come.

Sissinghurst helped Vita get through the doom, gloom and worry of the War, as the house and garden were somewhere close to her heart where she could find peace and retreat. Its walls gave her privacy and solace where she could write and garden whilst trying to forget the warplanes flying over-head, and the uncertainty brought about by the turmoil of war.

Vita gradually amassed a huge collection of Roses, many of which climbed freely over Sissinghursts tall brick walls. She wrote about these Roses and the garden in several books as well as newspaper columns, but she also visited and corresponded with others who shared her love of these beautiful plants.

The book begins with an unknown solitary rose which Vita found at Sissinghurst when she first moved in. Even highly respected Rosarians were unable to name it, and so Vita called it the Sissinghurst Rose and it is available to purchase to this very day. This rose symbolised the beginning of her life at Sissinghurst, but very poignantly her life ends with another beautiful rose, Madame Alfred Carriere, which was just coming into bloom and climbing near her bedroom window, as Vita fell ill towards the end of her life.

Timing is everything in life, and the beauty of this book is that it has been published at a time where our own generation is also experiencing unsettled times - many of us turned to our gardens in Covid, and now in this uncertain world our gardens are bringing us comfort and peacefulness in our day to day lives.

For me this book is a story of connection and parrallels between the past, the present, the people and the roses. This is what makes it so readable and it's why I have been unable to put it down. The story is about facts, but they are told like fiction, as the story weaves in and out of several peoples' lives, telling a compelling but beautiful story.

Many of the characters, who are of course real people, had another vocation, or occupation - Vita wanted to write, Constance Spry had a career in floristry and Edward Bunyard was renouned for his Fruit Nursery in Kent. Roses were a seondary interest, for each of them, but eventually came to be a huge part of each of their lives.

The book seems meticulously researched, and I found myself constantly jotting down names, places or plant names that I then looked up myself. I found it fascinating to read about Maud Messel and how the rose collection at Nymans, which now rambles through its ruins, so much affected her life. Also of Graham Stuart Thomas who initially became interested in old roses from a commercial view point, but ended up moving his whole collection to Montisfont towards the end of his life.

These people went to great lengths to treasure, protect and source their Roses - travelling to Europe to seek out a very rare rose, taking cuttings to preserve a rose for the future, or to simply share it with a friend, while refusing to dig up their roses when vegetables and "Dig for Victory" was a huge part of the war effort.

"Where the Old Roses Grow" is one of the best books I have read in a long time, and I hope that one day I will be able to meet Janelle McCulloch myself, and thank her for bringing these people's rose stories to life for me through the pages of her beautiful book.

Guineveres Garden | Garden Writer