Rose garden: Vale expert Susan Irvine, who recommended Lamarque flower
The potent bouquet of Lamarque roses became a sweet reminder of an old acquaintance.
LIKE old familiar tunes, flowering plants have a wonderful way of rekindling memories.
It happened to me a few weeks back when, in a wilder part of our garden, I came upon a bush of the magnificent white flowered rose Lamarque in full bloom.
Several bushes of this rose, first produced by an amateur rose hybridiser in France nearly 190 years ago, have been in our garden for more than 25 years and not once have they failed, annually producing vast swathes of delicious citrus-scented blooms.
Smelling a bloom of this rose once more, the memories flooded back.
I recalled I had planted it on the advice of someone who knew a lot about roses, Susan Irvine.
Now if you don’t know Susan Irvine, she is something of a legend in Australian rose circles.
A one-time headmistress of a leading Melbourne girls’ school and a scholar in so many fields, she devoted her retirement years to growing roses and writing books and magazine and newspaper columns about them.
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Apart from running a popular rose nursery at Malmsbury, Bleak House, Susan had dedicated much of her life to rediscovering and growing the roses of early Australian rose breeder Alister Clark (he produced possibly Australia’s best known rose, Lorraine Lee).
I first met Susan when — as the editor of a garden magazine, Your Garden, and having heard so many rose growers singing her praises — I convinced her she should write a monthly column.
Early in our relationship, I told her my wife and I were planning a garden around our recently acquired old farmhouse home and asked what roses I should plant.
“Lamarque,” she shot back in her typical headmistress tone. “It’s perfect for country gardens — you can’t go wrong with it.”
She was right, of course.
Yet what I didn’t know just recently when I smelled that Lamarque bloom was that just the week prior (I had been overseas) Susan Irvine had died in Tasmania, aged 91.
Coincidence? Maybe, but I’d like to think it was Susan’s way of reinforcing the worth of her rose advice to me all those years previous.
It’s advice that is as good today as then. The perfect country garden rose!
As I write this column I have a bloom of Lamarque sitting next to me on the desk and its citrus tones are all- enveloping.
A climber that can be grown as an arching bush, Lamarque flowers prolifically with clusters of slightly pinkish, slightly pale lemon centred double white blooms from spring right through into autumn.
Classified as a tea-noisette rose and named after a French general from the Revolution period, it copes brilliantly in most climates and isn’t too fussy.
While some recommend cutting it back by 70 per cent in winter, I confess our shrubs have been allowed to romp unhindered, never watered and largely uncared for apart from an attack with loppers every few years to eliminate dead wood. Yet each spring it bounces back brilliantly.
I have seen it grown up old barns and sheds, and it is a natural for large arches.
It makes a good cut flower, and with a vase of blooms your living room will smell like a French perfumery.
Thinking back, I recall Susan also recommended we grow another French climber, the spectacular pink Madame Gregoire Staechelin, up and along our farmhouse veranda.
We did and for a quarter of a century that, too, has been magnificent.
Yet recently we have been forced to pull out a few plants, purely to stop uninvited possums clambering up its sturdy canes to perform nightly dance spectaculars on our roof.
Even Susan Irvine couldn’t have foreseen the explosion in numbers of these furry marsupials.
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