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The Bedside Book of Old-Fashioned roses
Discussion id : 70-367
most recent 11 MAR 13 HIDE POSTS
 
Initial post 10 MAR 13 by Jay-Jay
Author is Keith Money. The book is released by Degamo Productions (UK) Ltd. 1985 Carbroke Norfolk England.
(Sometimes available on Amazon)
Patricia Routley attended me towards this book.
REPLY
Reply #1 of 1 posted 11 MAR 13 by Patricia Routley
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.
REPLY
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