My husband, Bob, and I love to go antiquing. We have a lovely collection of antiques in our home and we appreciate all the workmanship that went into their creation. I love vintage glassware and French, German, and English china, especially when the china has roses painted all over it. Bob collects antique tools. His interest began while spending time with his grandfather when he was little. Mine started with my grandmother’s gifting me with some family treasures when I was 23.

I have been collecting for many years now, and I have discovered other vintage treasures over time. Not everything belongs in a china closet or tool chest. Over my years of gardening, antique roses have found their way into my rose beds. There are many good reasons to grow vintage roses. Some of them have been around for hundreds of years! Some bloom only once. Others have a repeat bloom. Some have gazillions of petals, and some have only five or six.

I know rosarians who grow Old Garden Roses (OGRs) exclusively because they have shady gardens. Once blooming OGRs set their buds before the trees leaf out, and because they don’t need the sun to rebloom till the following year, they will grow happily in high shade for the rest of the summer. OGRs set beautiful hips (seed pods) which give added fall and wintertime interest to the antique rose bed.

There are thousands of them to choose from! They are usually easily propagated, too…often they will send out suckers from the base. Being own-root roses, all you have to do is dig up a sprout, pop it into some potting soil in a container, and grow it in a sunny spot until you have an established root system. My friend, Mirjana, simply takes cuttings and sticks them into the soil under an established rose. My grandmother did the same thing, only she would also cover the cutting over with a clean glass jar, making sure that there was enough shade so the cutting wouldn’t burn from direct sunlight in its mini greenhouse.

In olden times, when a beloved family member passed away, often folks would take a cutting from a favored rose and start it to plant at the cemetery. There are countless OGRs in graveyards all over the country. I found one that I got permission to propagate and share with rose friends that I call ‘Hartford’s Old North Cemetery Rose’ because no one is sure what its official name is. Those of us growing it just love it.

My ‘Old Ladies’ are planted on a hill that I call my ‘Rose Forest.’ When they attain their maximum growth it will look like a forest indeed!! ‘Old North’ is there, and a couple of old roses that got rescued from a bulldozer in a local garden re-do. There is ‘La Belle Sultane,’ a big, purple blossom producer from unknown Dutch origins before 1795, and ‘Rosa Mundi’, a pink striped rose from before 1581.

‘Rose de Rescht’ lives there, too…a pre-1900 damask perpetual with a scattered re-bloom, and so does ‘Rosa Gallica Officinalis’, the ‘Apothecary’s Rose’, from before 1240. Hybrid rugosas ‘Delicata,’ a soft pink from England in 1898, and ‘Magnifica,’ introduced in 1905 look like giant beach roses. My friend, Audrey, pulled up a sucker from her ‘Alika’ and gave it to me several years ago. It has 4” single blooms, and there are hundreds of them on the plant! It was found in Russia and introduced to North America in 1906.

These roses all have several things in common. They are extremely hardy, most of them grow very large, most have fairly good disease resistance, and they are usually the first roses in my gardens to bloom. The best thing? They are all intoxicatingly fragrant! Find a spot in your garden for a few of these beauties, and I guarantee you won’t be sorry! You can grow a little history, too.