Rose Author  

Listing last updated on Wed Aug 2024

United States

Georgiana L. Torrey (December 9, 1842 Lexington, Holmes, Miss. - 1920), married William Augustus Drennan (September 7, 1834 Cedar Springs SC - June 3, 1897 New Orleans LA) on April 6, 1861.

[From Rose Letter, February 2017, p. 16-17:] Mississippi native Georgia Torrey Drennan, later a resident of New Orleans. The youthful Georgia daughter of a wealthy plantation owner married young lawyer and judge William Drennan at the outbreak of the Civil War. Ms. Drennan would go on to become a horticulturist of note. A number of articles written by the well-educated author on a variety of subjects, including poinsettias, hyacinths, water lilies, and peppers, appeared in numerous “Southern” home and garden-related publications. Her most enduring effort, however, was dedicated to roses and, in particular, the still-new repeat-flowering roses highly suited for growing in the Deep South and Gulf Coast. Published in 1912, Drennan’s Everblooming Roses for the Outdoor Garden of the Amateur remains a classic rose book flowing with passion and devotion for life in the garden. It encapsulates her knowledge of and familiarity with the Tea, Noisette, and China rose families, the Hybrid Remontants (Hybrid Perpetuals), Polyanthas, Hybrid Rugosas, as well as “old” onceblooming favorites from her family’s Round Hill Plantation gardens north of Jackson, Mississippi (which burned to the ground during the war), the garden she and husband established in nearby Lexington, and the New Orleans garden she created in 1895.