Deep in a side canyon in the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains I once came upon the ruins of a homestead. There wasn’t much left, but there were roses there, pink and yellow, neglected but still blooming. Someone had planted them in a vanished garden years before, and they were still thriving decades later.
Roses have accompanied every wave of colonizers to California, but there are nine native California rose species, including Rosa californica, which grows from Oregon to northern Baja California, and thrives in the Santa Monica Mountains, where it can be found in along creeks and at the bottom of north-facing canyons. These flowers, soft pink and fragrant, are adapted to cycles of drought, fire, and flood, blooming undeterred throughout much of the summer.
The earliest known written reference to roses in California refers to wild roses. In a letter dated May 23, 1603, Spanish explorer Sebastian Vinzcaino, wrote that “rosas de Alejandria” blooming in abundance, while his companion, Padre Antonio de la Asunsion, described them as the “rosales de Castilla”, roses of Castile. The name stuck.
“Neither account describes the roses,” laments rose historian Darrell Schramm, in his 2017 book on California rose history. “But clearly these were not cultivated roses…The Spaniards brought the name from Spain, but not the roses,’” he concludes, quoting rose historian J.N. Bowman.
The Indigenous peoples of California have used the petals and rose hips of native rose species for food and medicine for millennia. The Spanish missionaries cultivated R. californica for its fragrance and medicinal qualities, but they also brought cuttings of what were probably damask roses like Rosa damascena and Rosa gallica officinalis, to grow in the mission gardens.
Damask roses are thought to have originated in the ancient Middle East, and are still cultivated for the perfume trade throughout much of the world.
There are a lot of “said-to-haves” and “may-have-beens” in the early written history of roses in California, but we know for a fact that Elena Rotcheva, the wife of the man who ran the Russian-American Company’s outpost at Fort Ross in Northern California, grew roses during her time there, between 1838 and 1841. She was a highly cultured woman—born Princess Elena Pavlovna Gagarina—who brought as much culture to the remote outpost as she could manage, including a conservatory where she grew her roses. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a prominent Californio military commander and landowner, controlled much of Northern California under Mexican jurisdiction during that same time period, and he also grew roses.
Roses have been valued and cultivated for thousands of years, but they were suddenly all the rage in the early nineteenth century. French Empress Josephine was famous for her rose garden at the Château de Malmaison; the wealthy, educated, and sophisticated were suddenly obsessed with roses. The arrival of China roses into the West, which bloomed all summer long, instead of only once a year, helped fuel the enthusiasm.
When gold was discovered in 1849, rose seeds and cuttings accompanied the miners rushing to stake a claim. Roses were also brought west by homesteaders flocking to the new state. The flowers were reminders of home, a source of comfort in a strange land far from everything familiar.
By the late nineteenth century, roses were big business in California. They became a symbol of the California dream, one that is still celebrated with the Rose Parade every New Year’s Day.
Heritage roses come in an astonishing variety of shapes and colors, but many only bloom once a year, usually in spring or early summer. The advent of “perpetual” tea roses that bloom repeatedly, bred from the China varieties, began pushing the older varieties out of favor in the early twentieth century.
By the 1950s, rose fanciers awoke to what could be called, without exaggeration, a rose cultivar extinction event. “Rose rustlers” across the United States rushed to save what they could in old gardens and cemeteries throughout California, Texas, and the South. Rose purists defined “heritage roses” as those varieties grown before 1867, the year the first hybrid tea rose was introduced by French rosarian Jean-Baptiste André Guillot (La France, a pink rose, is now itself a heritage rose). It also includes nameless heirloom varieties. For many, the term has come to mean any old rose that is no longer readily available. Despite the evocative name, no actual rustling occurs. Rustlers ask permission, take cuttings but do not uproot plants, and document their finds. The goal is to preserve and propagate lost or rare varieties.
Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery Rose Garden has a spectacular collection of antique and old garden roses. Many were planted to honor the dead, roses that have endured long after the people who planted them at a loved one’s grave were dust. Others were collected by “rose rustlers,” old rose enthusiasts who scoured ghost towns, homesteads, abandoned gardens and roadsides for forgotten varieties. The Sacramento Garden even features roses recovered from old gold rush mining camps—rose cuttings accompanied pioneers traveling by steamer half way around the world from the East Coast, and across the continent in covered wagons, cherished and nurtured on the tortuous journey.
Rose blossoms may be fragile and delicate, but the plants themselves can be tough and long-lived, flowering even after decades of neglect. Today, there are more than 400 heritage and heirloom roses in the old cemetery, many of them dating back to the early and mid-1800s.
The Huntington Gardens here in Southern California is also home to a fabulous collection of heritage roses, but sometimes heritage species turn up closer to home. We know of local gardens where old roses like Lady Banksia (a rambler with cloisters of tiny yellow flowers that was introduced in 1807); the pink-flowering “sweetheart rose” Cecile Brunner (1890) that can grow to be the size of a tree, and the ivory-colored centifolia called Sombrieul (1850) have bloomed every year for decades.
The roses that form the backdrop for so many wedding photos all have names and histories. So do the roses in paintings, on textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and the decorative arts. Roses were buried with the Egyptian pharaohs, they appear in Persian miniatures, Chinese brush paintings, in Medieval illuminated manuscripts and in lush profusion in European paintings. Modern roses often reflect the times. The hybrid tea rose known as the Peace Rose was introduced in 1945, at the end of WWII; the hybrid grandiflora Queen Elizabeth debuted in 1954, a year after its namesake was crowned Queen of England; and Blue Moon (really more of a lavender moon) was introduced in 1964 during the height of the space race.
In our garden there is a pink rose that was planted in the 1940s by the home’s original owner. Odds are it’s “Nearly Wild,” a rose that was introduced in 1941. A yellow-flowered rambler called “The Mermaid” thrived by the side of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu for more than fifty years. It was torn out when the Zuma Fire Station was remodeled. That rose debuted in 1918. The fire station was built in the 1930s. I have a 1927 letter from a great aunt that describes the beautiful Killarney roses that grew in her father’s garden in Indiana—a hybrid tea rose that was introduced in 1890. Thanks to the rose preservationionists who rescued this variety, I now know it was a semi-double pink tea rose.
Now, “modern” roses are at risk. Many have been torn out during the push to replace lawns and flower beds with gravel, astroturf, and succulents. Others have been the victims of the scorched earth approach to landscaping. Roses can be remarkably drought tolerant. Moving them instead of bulldozing them might just help preserve history as well as greenery.
I didn’t think to take a cutting of the roses I saw blooming at that long forgotten homestead. I’ll never know what they were, but they remain vivid in my memory: roses blooming in a place that humans had abandoned and forgotten, their lovely fragrance and fragile petals, the fulfillment of some long dead garden’s heart’s desire, and an unexpected blessing.
There has been a widespread renaissance of interest in heritage rose varieties, but there are plenty of later roses that are also now rare, antique, or even extinct. Heritage and antique roses aren’t as common as the modern tea roses, but it is now possible to track down many heritage and heirloom varieties, as well as native rose species.
Rosa californica is incredibly easy to grow and makes a beautiful garden plant with a couple of warnings: this species has a lot of sharp thorns that evolved to keep wildlife like deer from devouring the tender new growth and sweet-scented flowers. It’s not a good choice for an area where children or pets play. It also propagates via suckers and needs space. Keeping it contained to the desired area can be a challenge. In a location with enough room for it to spread out, this is a beautiful, tough, drought-tolerant plant that fills the air with sweet rose fragrance throughout June, July, and even August. When the flowers fade, it produces abundant red rose hips that are a favorite food of many native birds and wildlife, and make a lovely cup of rose hip tea. This plant is a living part of California’s history.
For an entertaining look at the rose rustlers, check out The Rose Rustlers, written by Gregg Grant and Bill Welch, published by Texas A&M University Press, 2017. Darrell Schramm’s book Rainbow: A History of the Rose in California, is also a fascinating read.
There are a number of rose nurseries that specialize in heirloom and heritage roses, they include roguevalleyroses.com/, www.antiqueroseemporium.com/, and thefriendsofvintageroses.org . The Theodore Payne Foundation is a good place to shop for native California roses, including R. californica, the native rose of the Santa Monica Mountains: www.theodorepayne.org.
