Uncle George responded well to south facing wall
FOUR years ago Percy Rackham, crofter at Lamington, west of Tain, laid new gravel for me.
A splendid job he did too — and it was inevitable that in doing what he did, the old climbing rose Etoile de Hollande which had long graced the corner of my garage, would be a goner.
For the next two years pristine gravel met harled wall at right angles, and no vegetation intervened or intruded. Until last year when a small shoot appeared. By Jingo, the old rose lived! And this year it has produced one flower.
I had no idea that a rose could disappear completely for that length of time, not a single shoot or leaf to be seen, and then struggle into the light from some still alive piece of root. It proved to me just how tough some of these old roses are.
Such things are affairs of State and of importance to the Highlands so last Saturday morning Councillor Stone puts a call through to Councillor Gillian Coghill in Caithness.
“Gillian — you’re the only person I know who has one — how high is your Ferdinand Pichard? My aunt has just given me one for my birthday, and I am trying to work out where to put it.”
Gillian told me that Ferdinand Pichard (dating from 1910) would grow big, five foot or more, and that I would much enjoy it. Thus a new (old) rose joined the garden, and carefully planted with plenty of well-rotted dung mixed into the wide and deep hole that I had prepared for it, I await its first striped flowers in happy anticipation.
Position is important when it comes to roses.
Why do the roses growing along the main drag in Dornoch look so good? Because they are grown against walls facing due south. My father had a theory that roses didn’t do so well on the Tain shore of
the Dornoch Firth, and that I should imagine has much to do with the northerly aspect of many of our gardens.
Certainly Uncle George proved the point for me.
Uncle George is not in the gardening books because that is not its real name (I think it’s a Gallica). I call it Uncle George because it originally grew against the roofless side chapel (burned during a skirmish between the Rosses and Mackays) next to Tain’s St Duthus Collegiate Church.
In 1877 the renovation of the formerly ruinous Collegiate Church was completed. At the same time the surrounding graveyard was planted up with suitable garden shrubs, one of which was the beautifully scented pink rose with whorled and quartered petals growing against the chapel. Much of the cost of the renovation and planting work was met by my grandmother’s great uncle, one George Macleod who had made good in India planting indigo.
That is why, when I purloined a piece of the rose’s root and planted it in my own garden, I called it Uncle George.
And I planted the root beside a large escallonia and facing north.
For many years it disappointed; it was nothing like its beautiful parent beside the south-facing chapel wall. Yes there were a lot of stems and leaves, and promising buds too, but when the flowers finally opened they were misshapen and many of them rotted by the damp.
So two years ago we dug it up, divided the roots in four, and re-planted them at the front of the house, one at every corner of a square bed around a birdbath.
My word! What a triumph — the shift to a warm due south position completely transformed Uncle George to the lovely rose beside the wall, which sadly is no more. Today the roofless chapel, a memorial to the bad behaviour of the Rosses and Mackays, has no roses next to it. I shall have to take a cutting and replant it, if nothing else in memory of my grandmother’s great uncle.
Curiously enough Uncle George’s repositioning taught me another lesson about roses. I learnt it when in mid-winter I was gathering fallen sticks under trees to the side of the house. When I looked at one of the sticks more closely I noticed that it was in fact part of Uncle George that I must have dropped half way during the transfer nine months before.
“What the heck” I thought, and on a whim planted it in some dirty gravel at the front of the house — and, blow me down, three months later it produced leaves followed by flowers. Like Etiole de Hollande, this rose is a survivor. Months of dry heat, followed by snow and ice, hadn’t quite killed what I had first mistaken for kindling.
When you read of the 2000-year-old date palm seed from King Herod’s palace that was successfully germinated, well, you can believe it.
I return one last time to the roofless chapel in Tain — and this is appropriate during the week of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn (24th June 1314).
Earlier in 1306 Robert the Bruce’s wife Elizabeth, his two sisters Mary and Christian, and his daughter Marjory had to flee to the north of Scotland to avoid capture by the English who were enraged by the coronation earlier that year of Robert and Elizabeth as King and Queen of Scotland.
On their last night of freedom they took shelter in the chapel in Tain, supposedly safeguarded by the sanctuary of St Duthus. While they were there the sanctuary was violated and they were captured and handed over to the English by none other than the Earl of Ross.
Nothing but trouble, these Mackays and Rosses.
