(1959)  Page(s) 186.  
 
1959 Constance Spry Favourite Flowers
p65 The unique Gallica rose ‘Charles de Mills’ shows itself in special splendour in the moist air of the garden in Scotland and so it shall be kept for the chapter about the flowers that grow up there.
Some of the old roses, some musks and some Bourbons, flourish with so much beauty that I must tell you about them. It seems hopeless to try to describe the Gallica ‘Charles de Mills’ as this rose develops up here. I have grown it in rich loam and in prepared clay and have thought it one of the best of the old roses; up here in a stony gravel path in the summer of 1958 it excels all else in the garden. The half-open flat flowers look as though a globe of crimson velvet petals had been cut cleanly in two to make a shallow chalice, a dark pool of colour, the the flower develops into quartered fullness of crimson and purple, cerise and wine. I have looked every day for a week at these roses and can find no way of translating in words their amazing personality. I thought I knew this rose in every variation of weather and conditions, but never have I seen it like this.

(1959)  
 
p43 In the picture facing page 37 it introduces a softening note to the bright yellow of horse-chestnut leaves and ‘Peace’ and the pinkness of the musk-rose ‘Cornelia’, a rose by the way that is particularly good in autumn when you can pick long heavily flowered stems with impunity.

p44 ….the warm-tinted ‘Cornelia’

p72 Until this year I have had reservations in my own mind about the decorative value in summer of the two hybrid musk-roses ‘Cornelia’ and ‘Felicia’. Waiting always for their grand autumn beauty both in house and garden, my feeling about their summer show has been luke-warm. Now in this same summer of which I speak they have been wreathed and garlanded with their delicious delicately coloured flowers, and it has been possible in early summer to pick those long, strong, well-flowered stems that I have always regarded as their autumn contribution. Again I would remind you what beautiful associates they are in decoration for the roses ‘Magenta’ and ‘Gletscher.’.

(1959)  Page(s) 60.  Includes photo(s).
 
Mauve and cerise, violet and grey also enter into the colouring of the flatter rose away to the left of this group facing page 57. It is 'Hippolyte', a Gallica variety, a charming bush which bears quantitites of flowers.

(1959)  Page(s) 53.  Includes photo(s).
 
From summer’s height I should like to go back to the April day when the picture facing page 52 was taken. This, the ‘Bridal Rose’, ‘Niphetos’, had been blooming already for some weeks in a cool enclosed veranda and though I knew only too well that I had written of it before I suddenly found a longing to do so again. Since the picture is not in colour you must guess, if you do not remember, how beautifully the grey-green reflexed calyx and soft colour of the leaves set off the fragility of the flowers; the petals are translucent and silken and the aristocratic head is richly heavy, bending down with its weight the slender stems. The ‘Bridal Rose’ is not easy to arrange; her drooping, delicate Victorian graces, to say nothing of her viciously curved thorns, militate against you. It is best to take off the thorns, certainly those at the base of the stem, before you begin. A tall vase, a chalice, or an urn will help by raising the flowers, so that the heads are properly seen.. here it is arranged with lily of the valley in two Victorian vases appropriate to its era; a narrow-necked vase to hold the higher flower stands in a milky-glass chalice. I like quite as well to use an old silver lustre vase, which, although in its pristine brilliance it may have reflected the lights of a country fair, has now by reason of age become greatly softened. When all difficulties surmounted, you get the flowers arranged to your liking, you may choose, as I do, to put them where the light from a lamp behind will so illuminate them that they become something of wraith-like beauty, a lovely apparition of more than ‘a moments ornament’. This apparition together with the hardly stated scent both ensnares and haunts the senses. This rose is, I think, something quite special and not to be compared with nor exchanged for the undoubted beauty of modern white roses. ..... Not a great many gardening books tell about this rose, so perhaps I may mention that pruning is generally done in late spring, after the flowers are over and that it pays to cut the long shoots that have borne flowers right back. The new shoots start into growth quickly and are then ripened by the late summer sun to flower the following year.

(1959)  Page(s) 63.  
 
....the perfectly shaped pink 'Reine des Centfeuilles'.