Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1884 — Beses at New Orleans. [ARTICLE]

Beses at New Orleans.

I don’t believe there is any region on earth where roses grow in such abundance, variety, beauty, and sweetness as they do in the New Orleans country. A Mississippi gentleman to whom I have been indebted for information on various subjects, tells me that there is growing and in bloom at his home at this moment a Lamarque rose vine eighty feet long. The stem is eight inches through in the thickest part. It was planted seventeen or eighteen years ago. It is twined around a veranda, and its gorgeous clusters of cream-tinted roses are splendid to behold. At New Orleans the Marechai Neil roses cause the Northerner to stare in speechless wonder. I saw one of the plants that must have been fifty feet long. I have seen vines of the same rose that long in the North, but they were scraggy and lean-looking and in the florists’ green-houses. At New Orleans they run wild and revel like a midsummer night’s dream. The blossoms grow in gorgeous clusters of half a dozen or more, and the flowers are so large that they would more than cover the top of a large-sized coffee cup. A single one of the pale gold beauties will fill a room with perfume. They are as plenty down there as “white top” in a Northern meadow. And they sell for $1 a bud up North. In some of the private citizens’ yards in New Orleans there are as many as a hundred diderent kinds of roses all in bloom at once. They do not require protection from cold at any time. They all stand outdoors in the open ground, and many varieties bloom more or less all the .winter through. The rose is a favorite flower at New Orleans. At the Jockey Club races we saw dozens of handsomely dressed ladies with exquisite bunches of rosebuds at their belts and elsewhere in their dresses—the sweet lovely flower that nature made, none of your abominable artificial things. The rose the French inhabitants of New Orleans are fondest of for decoration is called the “Gold of Ophir.” Northern florists - have it, but it is not common. The bud is especially prized for its" beauty. It is a smallish rose, of a very pale pink, shading on toward the heart into a deep, rich gold color. Faint streaks of crimson touch the outer petals. It is one of the loveliest roses I ever saw.—Commercial.