Noelene Drage bought a copy in the 1980s and shared it with Billy Teabag, who sent me down a photocopy for my birthday. Even as a black and white photocopy version, it is a beautiful and intimate rose book and one of the best birthday presents I have ever received. Billy tells me Keith Money now lives in New Zealand. Here is a sample from the book:
Such is Rose Madness once it enters the bloodstream: it rushes along strange new arteries and link-ways, arriving at distant doors. Pens start to target quite innocent doormats. In this respect, Mr. L. Arthur Wyatt responded nobly to numerous requests while he was still tending his marvellous collection of 'Lost' roses and I owe a lot of mine to his punctilious despatches. It is very distressing to think that many items from his wonderful collection (particularly the tea roses) have been allowed to founder since he handed them to a commercial nursery. Would someone have abandoned a field full of vintage motor cars? I did bring a number of the less well-known plants to my newest address (where Mr. Thomas noted down Ohl, and gallica velutinaeflora) but battling with ground that had been not only derelict but actively mistreated through thirty or forty years proved a depressing business. Usually, to dig a hole for just one plant involved removing, first, a solid carpet of nettles; rusting corrugated iron; pig wire; and-more than once-steel uprights from some air-raid shelter; but also, thereafter, smaller stuff: dozens of bottles that had once contained Owbridge's Lung Tonic or Foster Clark Ltd.'s Eiffel Tower lemonade concentrate, as well as those endless, endless pottery bottles made for cow drench. Then one had the makings of a hole - though even odd patches of formerly tilled soil produced a conjurer's never-ending stream of flints, old broken roofing tiles, bent pipes, strange wheels and shards of Mason's chinaware. Marital strife was evidently endemic in this area at the turn of the century; they must have flung the stuff at each other hourly. If it took archeologists at York days just to find the odd shoe or shard, how was it that I could produce two barrowloads of artifacts merely attempting to plant two roses? There must have been some mediaeval Civic Pride award on offer at York; I do wish the early Victorians had thought about such a thing in my area. However, once one had carted away all that accumulation one appeared to have the semblance of a hole apparently big enough for a rose. And of course at such a point one can always dig out another 40% and trim a third off the root spread. After that, as far as I am concerned, the best chap wins. No manure; no stakes; like it or leave it. Roses are remarkably tough creatures. Peter Beales is often amazed to see something like Gypsy Boy climbing fifteen feet up a salix. I tell him that if he was that Gypsy Boy, in that hole, he'd be climbing like a ferret up a warm trouser. It's a no-win situation down there in hard-core farmyard footings, and the only way is up. They treat me rough and I treat them rough, but in early July I must admit there's a certain relaxed give-and-take in evidence which lulls the occasional visitor into thinking that it is all a bit like an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem. Well, maybe not that bad; perhaps Swinburne on a damp evening. But I have to say that, like northern France, every inch has been fought over.
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