Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1881 — Wild Roses in Britain. [ARTICLE]

Wild Roses in Britain.

. We have altogether some five true mid roses in Britain. The commonest is the dog-rose, which everybody knows well; and next comes the almost equally familiar sweet-briar, with its delicatelyscented glandular leaves. The bumetrose is the parent of our cultivated Scotch roses, and the two other native kinds are comparatively rare. Double garden roses are produced from the single five-petalled wild varieties by making the stamens (which are the organs for manufacturing pollen) turn into brightcolored petals. There is always more or less of a tendency for stamens thus to alter their character; but in a wild state it never comes to any good, because such plants can never set seed, for want of pollen, aud so die out in a single generation. Our gardeners, however, carefully select these distorted individuals, and so at length produce the large, handsome, barren flowers with which we are so familiar.. The cabbage and moss roses are monstrous forms thus bred from the common wild French roses of the Mediterranean region; the China roses are cultivated abortions from an Asiatic species; and most of the other garden varieties are artificial crosses between these or various other kinds, obtained by fertilizing the seed vessels of one bush with pollen taken from the blossoms of another of a different sort. To a botanical eye, double flowers, however large and fine, are never really beautiful, because they lack the order and symmetry which appear so conspicuously in the fine petals, the clustered stamens and the regular stigmas of the natural form.-*-Belgravia.